How can I configure Laravel Herd's Nginx to correctly route clean URLs using a custom Valet driver?

Note/Solution: Expected behavior achieved using a custom Valet driver. Details are at the end of the post.

I am running a PHP site locally with Laravel Herd, which uses Nginx. I have a simple site structure where URLs like mysite.test/contact should serve contact.php—similar to Apache's mod_rewrite setup.

Current Behavior:

• Accessing mysite.test/contact serves the content of index.php instead of contact.php
• All routes return the homepage content

Expected Behavior:

• mysite.test/contact should serve contact.php
• mysite.test/about should serve about.php and so on

This same configuration works perfectly with Apache using .htaccess rules, but I haven’t been able to replicate it with Nginx under Laravel Herd.

How can I configure Nginx in Laravel Herd to properly handle these clean URLs?

EDIT:

Below are my Herd and Nginx configuration files:

NGINXCopied
user "fahimfoysal" staff;
worker_processes auto;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {

    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    sendfile on;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    types_hash_max_size 2048;

    client_max_body_size 512M;

    server_names_hash_bucket_size 128;

    gzip  on;
    gzip_comp_level 5;
    gzip_min_length 256;
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_vary on;
    gzip_types
        application/atom+xml
        application/javascript
        application/json
        application/rss+xml
        application/vnd.ms-fontobject
        application/x-font-ttf
        application/x-web-app-manifest+json
        application/xhtml+xml
        application/xml
        font/opentype
        image/svg+xml
        image/x-icon
        text/css
        text/plain
        text/x-component;

    include "/Applications/Herd.app/Contents/Resources/config/pro/nginx/*.conf";
    include "/Users/fahimfoysal/Library/Application Support/Herd/config/valet/Nginx/*";
    include herd.conf;

    include "/Applications/Herd.app/Contents/Resources/config/default-sites/*.conf";
}

Herd config:

NGINXCopied
server {
    listen 127.0.0.1:80 default_server;
    #listen VALET_LOOPBACK:80; # valet loopback
    root /;
    charset utf-8;
    client_max_body_size 128M;

    location /41c270e4-5535-4daa-b23e-c269744c2f45/ {
        internal;
        alias /;
        try_files $uri $uri/;
    }

    location / {
        rewrite ^ "/Applications/Herd.app/Contents/Resources/valet/server.php" last;
    }

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

    access_log off;
    error_log "/Users/fahimfoysal/Library/Application Support/Herd/Log/nginx-error.log";

    error_page 404 "/Applications/Herd.app/Contents/Resources/valet/server.php";

    location ~ [^/]\.php(/|$) {
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass $herd_sock;
        fastcgi_index "/Applications/Herd.app/Contents/Resources/valet/server.php";
        fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING  $query_string;
        fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD  $request_method;
        fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE  $content_type;
        fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH  $content_length;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME  $request_filename;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME  $fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI  $request_uri;
        fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_URI  $document_uri;
        fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT  $document_root;
        fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL  $server_protocol;
        fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1;
        fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE  nginx/$nginx_version;
        fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR  $remote_addr;
        fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT  $remote_port;
        fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR  $server_addr;
        fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT  $server_port;
        fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME  $server_name;
        fastcgi_param HTTPS   $https if_not_empty;
        fastcgi_param HERD_HOME "/Users/fahimfoysal/Library/Application Support/Herd";
        fastcgi_param REDIRECT_STATUS  200;
        fastcgi_param HTTP_PROXY  "";
        fastcgi_buffer_size 512k;
        fastcgi_buffers 16 512k;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME "/Applications/Herd.app/Contents/Resources/valet/server.php";
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
    }

    location ~ \.ht {
        deny all;
    }
}

Here are the .htaccess rules that worked with Apache:

APACHECopied
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]

---

Solution:

Laravel Herd uses a heavily customized version of Valet under the hood, which supports custom configuration through global or project-level driver files. Following the Herd documentation on Custom Valet Drivers, I resolved the issue by overriding the frontControllerPath(...) method in my custom driver. In my implementation, I added logic to check for a PHP file corresponding to the clean URL:

PHPCopied
$candidatePath = $sitePath . $uri . '.php';
if (file_exists($candidatePath)) {
    return $candidatePath;
}

This custom driver should be placed in your project root so that Laravel Herd picks it up automatically. It ensures that when a request such as /contact is made, the server checks for contact.php and serves it. If the file does not exist, it gracefully falls back to index.php.

Any insights on further refining this configuration are welcome!