Well thats true. But it's always a lot of work. You have to setup your database. You have to setup and configure the webserver. Then for each new project you have to add it to the webserver config. You have to add it to your host file etc.

Thats why valet is pretty neat. It bundles a few tools which makes your life easier.

So you have a folder with all your sites f.e. projects/ you can add it as the base dir to valet (you can have several) and valet maps every folder inside with Dnsmasq and adds it to the webserver config.

So you have projects/awsome-website and projects/my-blog ..etc.

And you can simply access it over awesome-website.dev and my-blog.dev

No need to add it manually to apache/nginx.conf or sites-enabled no need to edit hosts file!

Its a cli tool to manage everything you need. You can add folders from other destinations with

$ valet link 

Valet also includes ngrok so you can easy share your local sites with a tunnel.