How can I fix Homebrew issues while setting up a Laravel dev environment on Mac?

[PaulC]

I’m trying to set up a local development environment on my Mac for a Laravel project, and I keep hitting a wall with Homebrew. Every time I think I’ve got the dependencies sorted, something else fails to install or link correctly. Has anyone else gone through this recently and found a reliable sequence of steps?

[EvelynVH]

I was banging my head on Homebrew for days; I finally did a clean reinstall, ran brew update && brew doctor, fixed Xcode command line tools, then installed PHP 8.0 with brew install php@8.0 and ran brew link --force php@8.0.

[ScottVW]

I switched to Laravel Valet on a clean Mac and ran a Dockerized stack for the rest; the lingering dependency fights stopped once I stopped mixing host libs with container libs.

[KevinT]

Trying asdf to pin PHP felt good in theory, but the deps still fought me; I dropped it and went with a single PHP version for dev.

[ChloeL]

For me the real blocker was database client libraries; I swapped to SQLite in dev and used a simple docker-compose to mimic MySQL.

[DavidRW]

Concrete action I took: cleaned caches, restarted the shell, and kept the system libraries separate; sometimes the symlink pointed to a keg that didn't exist and a restart fixed it.

[JohnB]

Question: do you actually need the full PHP toolchain on the host, or would Docker/Sail cover the dev environment?