Javier Feliz

Using devenv with laravel

Feb 5, 2026

DevEnv is another amazing tool coming from the nix community that allows you to define a full dev environment including:

  • language support
  • tasks
  • processes

There's a little thing I found though: You have to add .devenv and .direnv to be ignored by vite's watcher or your app will crawl

    server: {
        cors: true,
        watch: {
            ignored: ['**/storage/framework/views/**', '**/.devenv/**', '**/.direnv/**'],
        },
    },

The devenv setup

In your devenv.nix

{
  pkgs,
  lib,
  config,
  inputs,
  ...
}:

{
  packages = with pkgs; [
    frankenphp
  ];

  languages.php.enable = true;
  languages.javascript = {
    enable = true;
    bun = {
      enable = true;
      install.enable = true;
    };
  };

  processes = {
    server = {
      exec = "frankenphp php-server --listen :8000 --root public/";
    };
    frontend_build = {
      exec = "bun run dev";
    };
  };

  services.postgres = {
    enable = true;
    listen_addresses = "127.0.0.1";
    port = 5432;

    initialDatabases = [
      {
        name = "betterhelp";
        user = "laravel";
        pass = "password";
      }
    ];
  };
}

After that, simply doing devenv up or devenv up -d (to start the processes in the background) will put up

  • Postgres
  • The app server
  • The vite watcher process to compile front end assets

Javier Feliz