Whats the point of running Laravel with the command 'php artisan serve'?

One advantage of using php artisan serve over a typical webserver during development is you can use Psysh as a debugger (Laravel Tinker) to set a breakpoint.

For example, at the line of code I want to break at I type:

eval(\Psy\sh());

Then I hit the page that will run that section of code and when it gets to that line it will break into a Psy Shell repl (in the commandline window where I started php artisan serve). Then I can inspect variables, etc. at that point of execution. It's very useful for debugging. As far as I know, you can't do this running Apache/Nginx. It has to be with artisan serve (or running automated tests).

More info here:

https://tighten.co/blog/supercharge-your-laravel-tinker-workflow

http://psysh.org/

Purpose: The purpose of using Php artisan serve (PHP builtin server) is just for testing and easy starting your project it should not be used in real website deployment.

Asset Not working: Always put your index file in public it's the beauty and security of Laravel framework and your assets will always working. if you are bore to use your custom URL like C:/wamp/www/pym/server.php then use Virtual host locally but don't but don't put your index outside the Public folder. if you really want to use index at your Root directory then you should customize your all asset() and url() helper functions and should put your exact url Example asset('/login') should be changed to asset('localhost/yourprojectroot/login').

The serve command is just a shortcut for the PHP Built-in Webserver, something PHP has out of the box, so the point of using it is to start testing your application as fast as you could, you just need to install PHP, Composer and your application is up (if you don't need anything else, of course). But if you already have Nginx installed, there is no point at all, just use it.

It's not wise to use the Builtin Webserver in production.