Laravel Herd is an amazing application designed to make it as easy as possible to get started with PHP development.

I have been using Homebrew to run MySQL, Redis, Meilisearch, and more, but since we recently got Herd Pro, I figured it made sense to consolidate.

Here are a few other articles on how to migrate databases to Herd Pro:

• Jason Beggs: migrate from DBngin by copying the data files to Herd Pro
• Ben Holmen: migrate from Homebrew by using mysqldump

My method is a combination of the two: copy the data files from the Homebrew MySQL to Herd Pro to save the time that it would take to dump and import.

Note: this only works if your homebrew MySQL and Herd Pro MySQL are on the same minor version (8.0.1 to 8.0.3 would work; 8.0.x to 8.4.x would not).

1. Stop the homebrew MySQL service, if you haven’t already: brew services stop mysql (or maybe [email protected] if you’ve updated in the past few months)
2. Stop the Herd MySQL service, if you haven’t already, using the Herd services UI
3. Find the Herd data directory: right-click on the MySQL service and choose “Open data directory”
4. Copy or move the files to retain a backup
5. Find the homebrew data directory: in a terminal, run open $(brew --prefix)/var/mysql to open the directory in Finder
6. Copy the files to the Herd data directory
7. Restart Herd
8. After you’ve confirmed everything is fine, maybe delete the homebrew mysql data directory and brew uninstall [email protected]