How do I install Aero on Mac?

There are a couple of ways to develop locally on the Mac:

• Valet – manually install the services directly on your Mac.
• Homestead – a virtual machine that runs the required services.

 

Valet

Laravel Valet is a development environment for Mac minimalists. It provides a blazing fast local development environment with minimal resource consumption, and points all requests on the *.test domain to sites installed on the local machine.

 

Step 1: Install Homebrew

Visit the Homebrew website and follow the instructions to install Homebrew.

Make sure everything is up-to-date by running:

brew update

 

Step 2: Install the services

Run the following command to install the services needed:

brew install php@7.4 mysql openjdk@8 elasticsearch@6 node composer

The services can then be started with the following commands.

Start MySQL:

brew services start mysql

Start Elasticsearch:

brew services start elasticsearch@6

Make sure to place Composer's system‑wide vendor bin directory in your $PATH:

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.composer/vendor/bin"

 

Step 3: Install Valet

You can then pull in the Valet package using Composer and install it using the following commands.

First require the Valet package:

composer global require laravel/valet

Then install the package:

valet install

 

Step 4: Create a database

To connect to the local MySQL server, run the following in your terminal application:

mysql -u root

Once connected, create a new database for your project. It should be named something that relates to your project to ease managing multiple local projects in the future. Run the following SQL, replacing [project-name] with the name of your project:

create database [project-name];

If your database name contains hyphens, you must wrap the name in back-ticks, e.g. `my-first-store`.

You can then disconnect from the MySQL server by typing:

exit;

 

Step 5: Install the Aero Commerce CLI tool

If this is your first project, you'll need to download the command‑line tool using Composer:

composer global require aerocommerce/cli

Once installed, you'll have access to the aero new command. This will create a fresh project installation in the directory you specify.

For instance, aero new myfirststore will create a directory named myfirststore containing an Aero project with all dependencies installed:

aero new [project-name]

During installation, you'll need to enter the package repository credentials and database connection details for the project. The installer will setup the database tables and seed the project with essential information.

 

Step 6: Link the project to Valet

The final thing to do is configure the project with Valet. This is achieved by running the valet link command from within the project's directory. You can provide a name to use as the domain, for example, to proxy all requests made to http://myfirststore.test to the project, the command would be valet link myfirststore:

valet link [project-name]

 

 

Homestead

Laravel Homestead is a pre-packaged Vagrant box that provides a development environment without requiring you to install any server software on your local machine.

 

Step 1: Install VirtualBox

Firstly, you'll need to download VirtualBox 6.x. Select the OS X hosts binary and run the installer.

During installation, you may encounter the following error screen:

 

 

This is due to security restrictions in macOS. To resolve this, open your terminal application and run the command:

sudo spctl --master-disable

Retry the installation. If the problem still persists, try restarting your Mac and running the installer again.

Once you've successfully completed the installation wizard, you should re-enable Gatekeeper by running the command:

sudo spctl --master-enable

 

Step 2: Install Vagrant

Head over to the Vagrant download page and select the macOS 64-bit link. Follow the prompts on the installation wizard.

Once complete, you can confirm Vagrant is on your machine by typing the following command into your terminal application to display the Vagrant version:

vagrant -v

 

Step 3: Install the Homestead Vagrant box

Run the following command in your terminal application:

vagrant box add laravel/homestead

The download may take several minutes, depending on your internet connection.

 

Step 4: Install Homestead

The Homestead GitHub repository needs to be cloned to your local machine. To do this, run the command:

git clone https://github.com/laravel/homestead.git ~/Homestead

This will create a copy of the repository in a new folder named Homestead within your home directory.

 

Step 5: Configure Homestead

Next, you'll need to create a default Homestead.yaml file which will serve as the instructions to configure your virtual machine. This can be done using the following commands:

$ cd ~/Homestead
$ git checkout release
$ bash init.sh

If you open the newly created Homestead.yaml file, you should see a format similar to this:

---
ip: "192.168.10.10"
memory: 2048
cpus: 2
provider: virtualbox

authorize: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

keys:
    - ~/.ssh/id_rsa

folders:
    - map: ~/myfirststore
      to: /home/vagrant/myfirststore

sites:
    - map: myfirststore.test
      to: /home/vagrant/myfirststore/public
      php: "7.4"

databases:
    - homestead

features:
    - elasticsearch:
        version: "6.8.6"

The authorize and keys properties specify the SSH key pair that will be used to connect to the virtual machine. You can generate the id_rsa files using the command below. There is no need to enter any information when prompted, so just hit enter to use the default values.

ssh-keygen

The folders property lists all of the folders to be shared between your Mac and the virtual machine. This allows you to develop using your local IDE (code editor), whilst also providing the web server and other services on the virtual machine access to the project files.

In the example Homestead.yaml shown above, we've specified to share the ~/myfirststore folder. This is going to be the local directory of our new Aero project, however the folder does not yet exist. To create this directory, run the following command, replacing [project-name] with the name of your project:

mkdir ~/[project-name]

This empty directory will be populated later on, from within the virtual machine. The to value of this folder mapping is the project's path on the virtual machine, e.g. /home/vagrant/[project-name].

The sites property allows you to define which domains will provide access to the projects. Using the example above, you can see the myfirststore.test domain is configured to point to the project's public directory, which is the web server entry point to the project. Ensure the to value is the virtual machine's project path and not the local one, i.e. /home/vagrant/[project-name]/public. Remember to replace [project-name] with the name of your project.

Homestead will automatically create the databases listed in the database property of the configuration file. By default, the database name is homestead. The installer will automatically detect this database later on, however, if you plan on developing multiple projects, you should name the databases in this list to match your projects.

Finally, you need to ensure that your Homestead.yaml configuration file contains elasticsearch in the features property, along with the version: 6 declaration.

 

Step 6: Add the domain to the hosts file

As the project is hosted locally, we need to add an entry to the /etc/hosts file, which will route all requests made to the development domain to your project:

sudo vi /etc/hosts

Open the /etc/hosts file in vi and add a record to point the domain to the IP address of the virtual machine (the IP listed in the Hometead.yaml configuration file). Press i to enter insert mode, and use the arrow keys on the keyboard to move the cursor to the bottom of the file. Add the following line, replacing [project-name] with the domain name entered in the sites property of your Homestead.yaml configuration file:

192.168.10.10   [project-name].test

To save the changes and exit the file, press Control + c to leave insert mode, and then type :wq! followed by pressing the Enter key.

 

Step 7: Provision the virtual machine

You are now ready to boot up the virtual machine. To do so, open your terminal application and navigate to the directory that Homestead was installed in earlier. You can then run the vagrant up command, which will read from the Homestead.yaml file and configure the virtual machine.

$ cd ~/Homestead
$ vagrant up

 

Step 8: Install the Aero Commerce CLI tool

The CLI tool needs to be installed on the virtual machine. To do this, SSH into the virtual machine using the command:

vagrant ssh

From within the virtual machine you will need to set the default PHP version by running:

php74

Next, download the command‑line tool using Composer:

composer global require aerocommerce/cli

Once installed, you'll have access to the aero new command, which needs to be ran from within the project directory on the virtual machine. For instance, running aero new . from within the directory myfirststore will scaffold an Aero project with all dependencies installed:

$ cd ~/myfirststore
$ aero new .

During installation, you'll need to enter the package repository credentials and database connection details for the project. The installer will setup the database tables and seed the project with essential information.