Laravel Herd 2 has been available since November 5, 2026. The local development environment for PHP and Laravel now ships with a browser-accessible coding agent panel and isolated workspaces for moving several features forward in parallel, without switching branches. The publisher frames this release as the shift from a plain PHP installer to a full workbench, from prototype to deployment.
Herd Studio: a coding agent attached to every local site
Herd Studio is a panel reachable from the browser on any site served by Herd, Laravel or not. An “Edit with Herd” badge appears on every page; running herd studio inside the project folder opens the same panel: a chat with an agent, a file explorer with PHP autocompletion, a diff view of proposed changes, a terminal, logs via Laravel Pail, and a queue monitor.
Herd does not ship its own agent. The chat runs on opencode, which lets a team connect the AI provider it already uses, with free models available without a subscription. An option also exposes Herd’s MCP server to Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or any other command-line agent.
Workspaces: isolating each feature without switching branches
A workspace is an isolated copy of a site, sitting on its own Git branch and reachable on its own subdomain. The following command creates a workspace dedicated to one feature, served for example on feature-auth.shop.test:
cd ~/Herd/shop
herd workspace feature-auth --database=cloneCloning happens through copy-on-write, so a workspace takes no extra disk space until files actually change, and Herd serves every existing Git worktree on its own subdomain. A workspace shares the parent site’s database by default; --database=clone copies its data, and --database=empty starts fresh from migrations. The .env file is duplicated and adjusted automatically, an automation that lines up with the best practices already documented for handling environment variables and secrets in web development.
A dev server that starts on demand
With Herd Studio active, the dev server launches as soon as the site is opened in the browser: php artisan dev for Laravel 13.25 and newer, or the dev script from package.json for other Vite setups, run with whichever package manager the project uses, npm, pnpm, Bun or Deno. If no production build exists yet, Herd holds the first request for up to 15 seconds while Vite starts, avoiding a Vite manifest error on first load. The server stops itself one minute after the last Herd Studio tab closes, if the site has received no request in five minutes.
Plans and availability
| Feature | Herd (free) | Herd Pro | Herd for Teams |
|---|---|---|---|
| Herd Studio and PHP Profiler | Included | Included | Included |
| Workspaces and on-demand dev server | Included | Included | Included |
| MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Mail | — | Included | Included |
| Tinker, Insights, extended agent runtime context | — | Included | Included |
| License portal, shared project configuration | — | — | Included |
This release follows by a few days the launch of Laravel 13.40, which strengthened queue monitoring. Exact pricing for Herd Pro and Herd for Teams is not listed in the official announcement. An already-announced 2.1 release is set to add separate controls for each AI-related feature.
Herd 2.0 is where Laravel apps get built, from idea to deployment.
Turning off Herd Studio kills all of its subprocesses, but the MCP server and the runtime context sent to agents remain independent settings: a team that does not want the chat panel needs to disable them separately.
What to remember
Herd 2 changes nothing for anyone using it purely as a PHP version manager: the existing setup keeps working exactly as before. The real news sits in workspaces, which let several branches of one project move forward without reinstalling the environment each time, and in coding agents being wired directly into the site being served rather than living in a separate editor.
Having a coding agent sit directly inside the local dev environment confirms a trend already visible among PHP tooling vendors: the agent stops being an editor plugin and becomes a service of the stack itself, on par with the web server or the database. A real concern remains for teams: workspaces share the database by default, and a poorly scoped agent can touch shared data without the team expecting it. Worth checking before rolling this out on a client project. — Simon Janvier
