How I Created Laragon and the Current Status of Laragon’s Development
How I Created Laragon
In late 2014, I wanted to build cool stuff with a trendy web framework at that time: Laravel. However, I found myself frustrated with the existing options for local PHP development on Windows operating systems. I had tried using XAMPP, WAMP, and Homestead, but found that they were often slow, time-consuming and complicated to set up, or lacked the features I needed for efficient development.
As I began to explore the idea of creating my own local development environment, I realized that I wasn’t alone in my frustration. Many developers who wanted to use their Windows laptops or could not afford to buy expensive Macbooks had similar complaints about the available solutions, and were eager for a more streamlined and user-friendly option.
With this in mind, I set to work on creating what would eventually become Laragon — a modern solution designed specifically for web application development on Windows operating systems. I focused on creating an easy-to-use, intuitive interface that would allow developers to quickly set up and manage their local development environment.
As I worked on the project, I also made a point of reaching out to other developers in the community for feedback and suggestions. I incorporated their ideas and input into the development of Laragon, constantly refining and improving the software based on real-world use cases and user feedback.
Eventually, Laragon began to gain traction in the PHP development community, as more and more developers discovered its ease of use and efficient workflow. Despite the availability of other solutions like Valet, Docker, Sail, Laragon has maintained its popularity as a top choice for Windows-based PHP development, and continues to evolve and improve based on user feedback and ongoing development efforts.
Laragon sets itself apart from other solutions by providing a containerized, isolated, and portable development environment that also integrates Node.js ecosystems for building modern frontend apps. With Laragon, developers can easily control multiple versions of various programming languages, giving developers complete ownership over their development experience. Thanks to Laragon’s powerful but lightweight core, which the binary is just around 2MB and uses just a few MB of RAM during runtime, developers can enjoy a reliable and efficient development environment.
Current Status of Laragon’s Development
When making Laragon, I had a dream of building an awesome software which would help developers save a lot of time dealing with their development environment, evolving it to a software that a developer would love at first use. However, because of busy earning a living, I did not spend too much time on Laragon. I had to take a day job to pay my bills and support my family, and my dream project became a side project, something I only worked on in my spare time. Years went by, and my job began to take more and more of my time. I worked long hours, sometimes into the night, and had little energy left to work on Laragon. My expertise is in Cloud Computing and hyperscale platforms and my daily job is related to this but I never forgot the happy feelings when coding Laragon. I have not spent much time on it, but I never give up on making it better. Next version of Laragon will include a Search Engine and I will write some articles to help developers to take advantage of Search Engine to provide users better search experiences. Moving forwards, every spare moment I have, I will spend working on my beloved project. I spend time making this story to commit to that.
To me, Laragon is the most beautiful thing that I ever created. I will write about “The beauty of Laragon” in another story.
