Fix broken laravel valet installation on MacOS

Published June 15, 2023

Valet is a very useful tool for setting up a local environment, however it can break due to an update to itself or one of its dependencies, and simply removing it using composer won't be enough, here's how to do a full clean removal on MacOS.

Remove Valet

composer global remove laravel/valet
rm -rf ~/.config/valet

This will remove it from our global composer packages, and delete the existing configuration for it

Remove nginx

brew remove nginx

Then we need to remove all configurations on nginx

sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf.default
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/fastcgi_params
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/fastcgi_params.default
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/koi-utf
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/koi-win
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/mime.types
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/mime.types.default
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/nginx.conf.default
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/scgi_params
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/scgi_params.default
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/servers
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/servers/lasalle.conf
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/uwsgi_params
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/uwsgi_params.default
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/valet
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/valet/valet.conf
sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/win-utf

Remove dnsmasq

brew remove dnsmasq

PHP version

Make sure php is set up, you can verify by running php -v, if not you can install it using brew, brew install php@8.0 for a specific version, or just brew install php for the latest

Installing Valet again

Now that we've done a wipe of valet, we need to install it again

brew install nginx # installing nginx again
composer global require laravel/valet # installing valet again
sudo valet install # setting up valet

Now it should be up and running correctly, you can use sudo valet to verify, and you can link your repos correctly using sudo valet link my_repo or parking an entire directory using sudo valet park ~/my-projects