@Orangeredman I haven't run into these issues (I'm on Windows 11, not using Herd) so I'm not sure why you guys had to run them, but this page in Laravel docs might help you a bit: https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/vite

Vite is used for bundling HTML, CSS, JS, and if you look in the app.blade.php and guest.blade.php in views/layout, you'll notice that Laravel is using Vite, on line 14&15:

        <!-- Scripts -->
        @vite(['resources/css/app.css', 'resources/js/app.js'])

Vite then seems to process those files, and output processed code/files in public/build/assets which Laravel then seems to reference as I see those files called in server logs when running the server via php artisan serve.

For me it seems that the Laravel installer automatically installed node dependencies and I suppose that php artisan server runs npm run dev in the background, meaning that I didn't have to do anything extra. Perhaps you didn't have Node & NPM already installed and then the Laravel installer couldn't automate that part?

Wish I could help you more!

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