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Troubleshooting Valet on macOS Sierra

Troubleshooting Valet on Sierra

Common Problems

Problem: I just see "It works!"

Apache is running on port 80 and interfering with Valet.

  1. Stop Apache: sudo /usr/sbin/apachectl stop
  2. Restart Valet: valet restart

Problem: Valet randomly dies once in a while.

You are probably still on Valet <= 1.1.19, we recommend pinning to ^1.1.22.

  1. Edit ~/.composer/composer.json to point to ^1.1.22:

    - "laravel/valet": "^1.1.19",
    + "laravel/valet": "^1.1.22",
  2. Run composer global update

  3. Restart Valet: valet restart

Problem: Every time I refresh I see a totally random file!

You are running Caddy 0.9.2, which has a known bug related to fastcgi connections.

  1. Edit ~/.composer/composer.json to point to ^1.1.22:

    - "laravel/valet": "^1.1.19",
    + "laravel/valet": "^1.1.22",
  2. Run composer global update

  3. Ensure you are now running Caddy 0.9.1: ~/.composer/vendor/laravel/valet/bin/caddy -version

  4. Restart Valet: valet restart

Problem: I'm getting a 502 Bad Gateway error.

Usually this means something is fucked with PHP FPM.

  1. Confirm that FPM is not running:

    ps aux | grep fpm

    You should see at least two processes there if PHP FPM is running (one is grep, ignore that one.)

    Chances are PHP FPM is not running.

  2. Check the PHP FPM error log to find out why it's not running:

    cat /usr/local/opt/php70/var/log/php-fpm.log

  3. Try to resolve any errors you see. Here's a few common ones:

Problem: /var/run/valet/fpm.socket does not exist!

If you see an error similar to:

Unable to bind listening socket for address '/var/run/valet/fpm.socket': No such file or directory

...in /usr/local/opt/php70/var/log/php-fpm.log, you were probably running dev-master and have now switched back to tagged releases.

Valet 1.1.22 attempts to automate fixing this issue by explicitly configuring where PHP FPM should listen.

  1. Make sure ~/.composer/composer.json points to ^1.1.22:

    - "laravel/valet": "^1.1.19",
    + "laravel/valet": "^1.1.22",
  2. Run composer global update

  3. Run valet install

Problem: php-fpm.conf is missing!

Something went wrong when installing PHP through Homebrew. This seems to happen on fresh non-upgrade installations of macOS Sierra.

  1. Uninstall PHP 7: brew uninstall php70
  2. Reinstall PHP 7 from source: brew install php70 --build-from-source
  3. Re-run valet install

Where to Look for Errors

If you are still running into problems and are a capable adult, here's a list of log files to check:

  • Caddy start log:

    /tmp/com.laravel.valetServer.err

  • PHP FPM error log:

    /usr/local/opt/php70/var/log/php-fpm.log

  • Caddy error log:

    ~/.valet/Log/error.log

@robbielove
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I spent over a day trying things to get my install working again after upgrading to macOS sierra and having it randomly stop working despite working for hours after upgrading, I had to update valet, brew and php70 and then finally got connection refused - a dns issue, valet was reporting my custom domain, however the dnsmasq config showed .dev had defaulted again. remapping the domain in valet fixed it.

@jasperf
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jasperf commented Sep 28, 2016

Had issues as well. Got connection refused and it started after the upgrade to OSX Sierra. Opened a thread on it at Super User. Fortunately after an upgrade things started working again. Then I also found the Laravel News blog posts talking about troubleshooting referring to the gist here. Still rather slow and I do experience these errors today:

28/Sep/2016:09:11:21 +0300 [ERROR 502 /server.php] write tcp 127.0.0.1:80->127.0.0.1:58756: write: broken pipe
28/Sep/2016:09:43:41 +0300 [ERROR 502 /server.php] write tcp 127.0.0.1:80->127.0.0.1:58764: write: broken pipe
28/Sep/2016:09:53:24 +0300 [ERROR 502 /server.php] write tcp 127.0.0.1:80->127.0.0.1:58759: write: broken pipe
28/Sep/2016:11:06:47 +0300 [ERROR 502 /server.php] write tcp 127.0.0.1:80->127.0.0.1:49573: write: broken pipe
28/Sep/2016:11:31:13 +0300 [ERROR 502 /server.php] write tcp 127.0.0.1:80->127.0.0.1:58695: write: broken pipe
28/Sep/2016:11:31:21 +0300 [ERROR 502 /server.php] write tcp 127.0.0.1:80->127.0.0.1:59439: write: broken pipe

and no related errors at /usr/local/opt/php70/var/log/php-fpm.log , but things work most of the time. Happy it is working again now.

@RichardStyles
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Had a issues when switching from php70 to php71 and back again.

  1. rm -rf ~/.valet
  2. valet install

Solved the issue I had "no response" from chrome, yet nothing obvious appeared in the error logs.

@scottzirkel
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I had a conflict in Sierra with co.echo.httpdfwd.plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons. I could ping *.dev just fine, but I kept getting ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED in the browser. Removed the file and restarted and all my sites started to load.

Found the fix here.

@PauBenetPrat
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I had valet and laravel running but there was no way to access to my parked applications. I installed valet2 as laravel page suggest (https://laravel.com/docs/5.3/valet). After trying to reinstall system, php71 in many ways an some more staff i had to downgrade valet to v 1.1.22 and php71 to php70 and that did the trick! I've got no idea way new valet release wasn't working :S

@mnedoszytko
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Same for me - I got valet 2.0.3, installed according to Instruction.
Initially I couldn't ping *.dev domains, I got 127.0.53.53, instead of 127.0.0.1, after installing valet over sudo I could ping any host on domain I set through valet without any problem 127.0.0.1, however I can't open the sites in any browser, curl -O shows remote file name has no length.
Tried removing ~/.valet dir, reinstalling, and so on..
PHP 7.1.1, and I do not want to downgrade. Any ideas how to troubleshoot that?

@pyropoptrt
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@mnedoszytko Here is the method I used to get everything working:

  1. Deleted the ~/.valet directory
  2. brew unlink nginx && brew remove nginx
  3. brew unlink php56 && brew remove php56 && brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies php56
  4. brew unlink php71 && brew remove php71
  5. brew unlink dnsmasq && brew remove dnsmasq

After running those steps I did brew update and followed instructions on doing a fresh install. Another caveat, I had my folders already name project.dev so I had to rename them to just project. Hope this helps.

@tommymarshall
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tommymarshall commented Feb 15, 2017

On new macOS Sierra, we were getting no response running ping foobar.dev after installation.

  1. rm -rf ~/.valet
  2. valet install

Like @RichardStyles mentioned above.

@simplenotezy
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What about something like this, but for Valet 2.0 @adamwathan?

@bsesic
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bsesic commented Dec 19, 2017

I always got a dns error when I wanted to access the page.
I tried a lot of things, reinstalling, reconfiguring dnsmasq and valet, etc.

What finally worked was simply to change the TLD to .test and it worked!

@melker-io
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melker-io commented Feb 17, 2018

If anyone is having trouble with "It Works!" and stopping Apache does not solve your issue, something else is running on port 80.

Open Acitvity Monitor>Memory and look for port 80. Unless it's something important, stop it by opening up that process and clicking Stop. Mine was running awdd (Apple/Wireless/Diagnostic/Data). Stopping it solved it for me.

@Maxcutex
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Maxcutex commented Apr 7, 2018

i am having the same problem on mac. installed valet 2.0 and done all the processes to setup valet. but i get 502 bad gateway and all the help above doesnt work

@ClaryPollack
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@Maxcutex me too :*( I just bought a new MacBook Pro on Sunday and have been trying to get this rolling for three days now. Crazy, isn't it? Will let u know if I figure out what the issue is (and pls feel free to do the same). Cheers.

@markstachowski
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Mine also has this issue and I installed a brand new copy of macOS "not" beta at all on it.

@HYR
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HYR commented Jul 31, 2018

Just want to add that before Valet started working for me I had to restart my whole system.

@EricBusch
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EricBusch commented Aug 17, 2018

I'm running El Capitan and got the 502 Bad Gateway error. Here's what I did to fix it.

After running this brew list | grep php I saw that I had 4 different versions of PHP installed:

  • php
  • php71-xdebug
  • php72
  • php@7.1

So I did the following though I'm not exactly sure which step fixed the 502 error.

brew upgrade nginx - Upgraded Nginx from 1.12.2_1 to 1.15.2

Then, as per this article, ran the following command:

brew list | grep php | while read x; do brew uninstall --force $x;
done

That left me with the following installs of PHP:

  • php
  • php72

Next, I ran brew upgrade php which upgraded PHP from php 7.2.3_1 to 7.2.9.

Finally, I ran valet install for good measure.

This fixed the 502 Bad Gateway on Mac El Capitan encountered when trying to run Valet.

@haleyngonadi
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@EricBusch your solution worked perfectly for me. Thank you!

@regal2157
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@EricBusch thanks! For me all I needed to do was upgrade nginx via brew and run valet install. It seemed to be okay with my variety of PHP installs

@mattias-persson
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mattias-persson commented Mar 10, 2019

If anyone has problems with connecting to MySQL, getting Can't read dir of '/usr/local/etc/my.cnf.d' (Errcode: 2 "No such file or directory") or Can't connect to MySQL server on '127.0.0.1' (61), try running the following:

mkdir /usr/local/etc/my.cnf.d.

Brew seems to sometimes prune this folder as specified here: Homebrew/legacy-homebrew#31760.

@jake-101
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I had this issue "dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/opt/icu4c/lib/libicui18n.62.dylib error" and PHP wasn't being found. Running brew upgrade and brew cleanup fixed it.

@renepardon
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Looks like valet is running smoothly and then the next page refresh I just receive ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED. I tried already restarting, upgrading, etc. I may switch back to manual setup/docker. So sad. The idea behind valet is so nice.

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