Homestead for Laravel development

Setting up Homestead for Laravel development

Introduction

Today I set my computer up with Homestead, a Vagrant box that sets up a development environment. Specifically, as of this post, it comes with:

  • Ubuntu 14.04
  • Git
  • PHP 7.0
  • HHVM
  • Nginx
  • MySQL
  • Sqlite3
  • Postgres
  • Composer
  • Node
  • Redis
  • Memcached
  • Beanstalkd

Prerequisites

Setting up homestead is easy: first, download Vagrant and a virtual machine environment such as VirtualBox. After downloading, add the Vagrant box laravel/homestead by running the following:

vagrant box add laravel/homstead

Installing Homestead

After those are setup, install Homestead by cloning the repository in your home directory. Run the following:

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/laravel/homestead.git Homestead
./Homestead/init.sh

Setup for Homestead doesn’t take long. You’ll find its setup in the ~/.homestead/Homestead.yaml file. This file defines folders to be synced from your computer to the vagrant box—folders that contain your apps:

folders:
  - map: ~/Code
    to: /home/vagrant/Code

You then define sites:

sites:
  - map: homestead.app
    to: /home/vagrant/Code/Laravel/public

Finally, you need to remember to edit the /etc/hosts file on your local machine. Add the following to map the above domain, “homestead.app”, to the vagrant box:

192.168.10.10 homestead.app

That’s it! Once all that is setup, run vagrant up inside the ~/Homestead directory. Vagrant will provision your machine with all the defaults you set in your yaml file. I like this approach better than using tools like MAMP or the like; it feels more portable, and I like the idea of being able to version control an environment in case other developers need to jump on the project. Tools like this and Docker bring a level of parity between development and production environments that is quickly approaching 1:1, which is a great thing.

That’s certainly not all you can do with Homestead; you can have a homestead configuration per project, setup HHVM for some projects, use NFS file systems, among other things. Check out the full Homestead documentation for a full rundown..