Recently I’ve found myself using Laravel Valet for local PHP development on my Mac. I love how fast and low-maintenance it is.
One thing that is a little tricky about Valet is that you can’t really write custom Nginx configs. That means that I couldn’t use my favorite technique of routing missing images to the production site, via Jetpack’s Site Accelerator (formerly “Photon”) CDN.
Normally, when doing local development on a WordPress site, you need three things: the codebase, a copy of the database, and the wp-content/uploads directory. But if you just redirect missing image files to your production site, you don’t need to laboriously copy all those files and clutter up your local machine.
I found myself really missing that technique today, so I wrote a driver for Laravel Valet that handles it!
You can get it here: WordPress Jetpack Valet Driver.
Mark on WordPress 