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Per-Site Services

Herd Pro lets you choose which services a Laravel application uses right from the Applications window. Instead of looking up hosts, ports and credentials and editing your .env file by hand, you select a service from a dropdown and Herd updates the configuration for you.

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Switching services

Select a site in the Applications window. The “Services” section of the inspector shows one dropdown for each of these categories: Each dropdown lists the built-in Laravel options, the matching services that you already installed and services that you can install. When you select a service that isn’t installed yet, Herd installs and starts it, and applies it to your application afterwards.
Selecting the database of a site
When you switch to MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL, Herd asks which database the application should use. You can pick an existing database or create a new one. To use a different database on the same server later, click “Change…” below the database name.
Per-site services are available for Laravel applications. For other applications, use the services settings and configure the connection yourself.

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What Herd changes in your .env file

Herd detects the current configuration from your .env file and only changes the keys of the category that you switch: Herd keeps your DB_DATABASE value when you switch database servers, unless you select or create a different database. When you switch to SQLite, Herd sets DB_DATABASE to database/database.sqlite and creates the file if it doesn’t exist. Before Herd changes a category for the first time, it saves the original values to a .env.herd-services.bak file next to your .env file. Select “Not managed by Herd” in the dropdown to restore these values.

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Via the CLI

You can view and change the services of a site with the herd site:services command. Without arguments, it lists all categories with their current value and all options.
You can pass a built-in option like sqlite, sync, database, array, file, log or null, or the name, type or ID of an installed service.