Add extensions to Laravel Herd without Homebrew
Herd is a project that takes Laravel Valet, which we used for many years, and wraps it up into a nice UI. In addition, Herd will install precompiled versions of PHP for you, whereas Valet depends on Homebrew to compile PHP on your machine.
For all the benefits it brought the Mac ecosystem, we have experienced many instances where doing a Homebrew update would cause other dependencies to break on our machines, leading to hours or even days of lost productivity to get everything fixed and running again.
Laravel Sail solves this problem by building all of your dependencies inside a Docker container which won't be effected by Homebrew, however Sail can be quite heavy to get setup and can be overkill on simple projects.
Herd gives us a different approach where PHP is precompiled, so you don't need to worry about compiling it yourself, or dealing with Homebrew in general - it's largely just install Herd, and you're off to the races.
For a recent talk I was working on, I wanted to parse email files (.eml) in realtime using Laravel, and to do that I needed the Mailparse PHP extension.
