php artisan serve for Laravel 5

Important: In an entertaining example of poor timing, Taylor Otwell added the serve command back into the framework shortly after I published this. There is now no need to use this package.

Users of Laravel 4 will remember that it came with a fantastic little command:

php artisan serve

This was a quick and easy shortcut to boot the PHP development server, and work on your Laravel application locally. However, Laravel 5 came along and the command was removed, and everyone was sad… Sure, you can boot the PHP dev server very easily, but I missed typing this command before I started work on a project. Call me sentimental…

So to replace this critical piece of functionality, I have built a simple little Laravel 5 package that adds our beloved command back in: valorin/artisan-serve.

Usage

First, install the package via composer:

composer require valorin/artisan-serve

Second, update the providers array in config/app.php:

'providers' => [
    ...
    'Valorin\ArtisanServe\ServeServiceProvider',
],

Third, run the command via composer:

php artisan serve

Enjoy!