Drivers

A driver tells Valet how to serve one kind of application: whether it recognises the site, which requests are static files, and which PHP file handles everything else. Run valet which in a site’s directory to see which driver serves it.

Built-in drivers

Valet tries drivers in this order and uses the first that recognises the site:

1. A LocalValetDriver.php in the site’s directory.
2. Your custom drivers in ~/.config/valet/Drivers.
3. Statamic, then Laravel.
4. Bedrock, CakePHP, Concrete CMS, Contao, Craft CMS, Drupal, Jigsaw, Joomla, Katana, Kirby, Magento 2, Neos, Nette, Radicle, Sculpin, Shopware 5, Statamic v1 and v2, Symfony, TYPO3 and WordPress.
5. A generic driver for sites with a public directory, then a generic driver that serves any directory.

Writing a custom driver

Custom drivers live in ~/.config/valet/Drivers, one file per driver, named <Framework>ValetDriver.php. valet install puts a SampleValetDriver.php there to start from.

A driver extends Valet\Drivers\ValetDriver in the Valet\Drivers\Custom namespace and implements three methods. Each receives the site’s full path, its name (for example blog) and the request URI:

<?php

namespace Valet\Drivers\Custom;

use Valet\Drivers\ValetDriver;

class WordPressValetDriver extends ValetDriver
{
    /**
     * Whether this driver serves the site.
     */
    public function serves(string $sitePath, string $siteName, string $uri): bool
    {
        return is_dir($sitePath . '/wp-admin');
    }

    /**
     * The full path of a static file to send as-is, or false.
     *
     * @return string|false
     */
    public function isStaticFile(string $sitePath, string $siteName, string $uri)
    {
        if (file_exists($staticFilePath = $sitePath . $uri) && is_file($staticFilePath)) {
            return $staticFilePath;
        }

        return false;
    }

    /**
     * The PHP file that handles all other requests.
     */
    public function frontControllerPath(string $sitePath, string $siteName, string $uri): ?string
    {
        return $sitePath . '/index.php';
    }
}

isStaticFile is only called when serves returned true and the URI isn’t /.

A driver for one site

To customise a single site, put a LocalValetDriver.php in its root directory. Its class is called LocalValetDriver, has no namespace, and can extend any built-in driver:

<?php

use Valet\Drivers\LaravelValetDriver;

class LocalValetDriver extends LaravelValetDriver
{
    public function frontControllerPath(string $sitePath, string $siteName, string $uri): ?string
    {
        return $sitePath . '/web/index.php';
    }
}

Environment variables per site

A .valet-env.php file in a site’s directory sets $_SERVER variables for its requests. Keys under '*' apply to every site served from that directory, and keys under a site name only to that site:

<?php

return [
    '*' => ['APP_ENV' => 'local'],
    'blog' => ['APP_DEBUG' => 'true'],
];