Laravel Development Environment Tools

Below are the lists of Laravel Development Environment and Ecosystem tools that are commonly used in the community. Each of these tools serves a purpose on its own use cases and it's equally important for the ecosystem.

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is an essential IDE (Integrated development environment) that boosts the productivity of web development, especially if developing PHP projects such as Laravel. It comes with a lot of features and the most recommended tools for every PHP developer. Although it comes with a cost, the features that it provides worth the investment.

Tinkerwell

As many developers know, Laravel comes with tinker which is a command-line tool that allows the developer to interact with a database. It's really handy to use the command line but it's only scoped within the project itself. Tinkerwell is a stand-alone tool that allows developers to run Laravel tinker outside the terminal itself. It's also feature-packed and recommended for every Laravel developer.

TablePlus

Although PhpStorm comes with features that allow for database access, many prefer stand-alone tools that are mainly geared for accessing databases. TablePlus is the many go-to for developers since it supports many database vendors, multiple configurations, easy to use beautiful interface, fast performant, and cross-platform native application.

DBngine

DBngine is a free all-in-one database version management tools and I personally recommend this since it's really easy to setup and install the database.

Xdebug

Debugging happens in every project and Xdebug is the recommended tool for debugging PHP projects in general. Although we can use Laravel's dd function to perform code inspection, having fully debugging tools like Xdebug is really handy. A

Notable Mention

Visual Studio Code - the text editor for all, highlight recommended and very lightweight.
Sequel Pro - very popular MySQL database management application but sadly not well maintained.