Laravel Sail ships with a curated list of services you can opt into when you install it. MySQL, Redis, Mailpit, Meilisearch, Mongo, and a few others. But the docs are a little terse on how to add a service after you’ve already installed Sail, or how to bolt on a service that isn’t in the official list at all.

Here’s the full picture.

The fastest way (if you don’t want to read 1500 words) Recommended

If you’d rather click checkboxes than edit YAML, Sail Manager gives you a service picker on the create-project form. All 13 official services are there, plus a free-form field for custom ones. Pick what you want, click Create, and the right --with= flags get passed to sail:install for you. No compose.yaml editing, no .env patching, no port collisions. Free, MIT, docs here.

For everyone who wants to know what’s actually happening under the hood — read on.

The 13 services Sail knows about

When you run php artisan sail:install, the installer offers these:

Service	Category	Default port
MySQL	Database	3306
PostgreSQL	Database	5432
MariaDB	Database	3306
MongoDB	Database	27017
Redis	Cache	6379
Valkey	Cache	6379
Memcached	Cache	11211
Meilisearch	Search	7700
Typesense	Search	8108
Mailpit	Mail	1025 / 8025
MinIO	S3 storage	9000 / 8900
Selenium	Browser tests	4444
Soketi	WebSockets	6001

Pick the ones you need. The installer writes them into your compose.yaml and adds the right env defaults to your .env.

Adding a service to a fresh project

For a new install, just include the services in the --with= flag:

php artisan sail:install --with=mysql,redis,mailpit

That’s the cleanest path. The installer is idempotent in a single run, but rerunning it later doesn’t merge — it overwrites. So pick what you need up front.

Adding a service to an existing project

This is where most people get stuck. Sail’s --with= flag rewrites compose.yaml from scratch, which clobbers any custom changes you’ve made. Two safer paths:

Option A: rerun sail:install if you haven’t customized compose.yaml

If your compose.yaml is still vanilla, rerunning the installer is fine:

php artisan sail:install --with=mysql,redis,mailpit,meilisearch

It’ll regenerate the file with everything in the new list. Backup first, just in case.

Option B: manually add the service block

Open compose.yaml and add the service. The official Sail compose snippets for each service are in the Laravel Sail repo. Copy the relevant block.

For example, to add Redis to a project that doesn’t have it:

services:
  laravel.test:
    # ... existing config
    depends_on:
      - mysql
      - redis    # add this line

  redis:
    image: 'redis:alpine'
    ports:
      - '${FORWARD_REDIS_PORT:-6379}:6379'
    volumes:
      - 'sail-redis:/data'
    networks:
      - sail
    healthcheck:
      test: ['CMD', 'redis-cli', 'ping']
      retries: 3
      timeout: 5s

volumes:
  sail-redis:
    driver: local

Then update your .env:

REDIS_HOST=redis
REDIS_PORT=6379
CACHE_STORE=redis
SESSION_DRIVER=redis
QUEUE_CONNECTION=redis

And restart:

sail down
sail up -d

Same pattern works for any other service. Pull the snippet from Sail’s source, drop it in, update .env, restart.

What about services Sail doesn’t know about?

Plenty of real-world projects need things outside Sail’s default list. ClickHouse for analytics. RabbitMQ for legacy queues. A dedicated Elasticsearch when Meilisearch isn’t enough. Postgres + TimescaleDB. The list goes on.

Adding any of these is just a compose.yaml edit. Pick an image, give it a name, expose the port, point your app at it via env vars.

services:
  clickhouse:
    image: 'clickhouse/clickhouse-server:23'
    ports:
      - '${FORWARD_CLICKHOUSE_PORT:-8123}:8123'
    volumes:
      - 'sail-clickhouse:/var/lib/clickhouse'
    networks:
      - sail
    ulimits:
      nofile:
        soft: 262144
        hard: 262144

volumes:
  sail-clickhouse:
    driver: local

The convention I’d suggest:

Use FORWARD_<NAME>_PORT as the env var name for the host port. It matches Sail’s pattern and stays out of the way of your app’s own env.
Use sail-<name> for the volume name. Same reasoning. If you ever run docker volume ls, you can spot which volumes belong to which project at a glance.
Add the service to the sail network. Otherwise Laravel can’t reach it by container name.

The port collision problem

Once you start adding services across multiple Sail projects, you’ll trip over the port-collision problem. Two projects with Mailpit both want port 1025; Docker says no.

The fix is per-project port assignments in each .env:

FORWARD_DB_PORT=33061
FORWARD_REDIS_PORT=63791
FORWARD_MAILPIT_PORT=10251

I’ve written about this in more detail in How to run multiple Laravel Sail projects at the same time, but the short version is: every service has a FORWARD_*_PORT variable, and you need to set them per-project to avoid conflicts.

Sail Manager handles this automatically — it allocates free ports per service per project and writes them to .env so you don’t have to think about it.

Choosing services for common stacks

A few stacks I keep coming back to, in case it saves you the decision:

Plain Laravel app: MySQL + Redis + Mailpit. The minimum that gives you sessions, cache, queues, and email testing.
API only: MySQL + Redis. Skip Mailpit if the API doesn’t send mail.
Full-text search app: Add Meilisearch. Or Typesense if you prefer it; both are fine.
Photo or file uploads: Add MinIO. Lets you point your S3-driven code at a local S3-compatible store.
Realtime app: Add Soketi (Pusher-compatible) or run your own WebSocket service.
Browser tests: Selenium. Run it once, set up Dusk, you’re done.

After adding a service

Two things to remember every time:

Update .env. New services often need new keys (MEILISEARCH_HOST, MAIL_MAILER, etc.). Sail’s installer does this for you on first install but not when you add manually.
Run migrations or setup commands. New databases need migrations. New caches don’t, but you might want to flush them. New search engines need their indexes built.

For Laravel-specific cleanups:

sail artisan config:clear
sail artisan cache:clear
sail artisan migrate

That’s it. Adding services to Sail is mostly mechanical once you know the convention. The hard part is knowing which services to add, not how to add them.