The Laravel 5 Vagrant box: Homestead 2.0

It is possible that if you followed along with the last post, you might get some errors in starting up a Laravel 5 project. The error might depend on several factors such as OS or previous package dependencies, and manual intervention is probably required. This is why a virtual machine is a great way to manage development environments, particularly via Vagrant.

Homestead is Laravel's officially pre-packaged Vagrant box that is already set up with everything needed to run a Laravel project.

Virtual Machine setup

Install Vagrant
Install Virtualbox
Add the Homestead Virtualbox:

vagrant box add laravel/homestead

Homestead source files setup

Now, from here there are two ways of getting a box running. There is no need to do both.

I prefer cloning the Github repository, which is also the officially documented way at the time of this writing for Laravel 5.0. My reason is that if you "dirty" your Homestead repository, it really doesn't take a lot of effort to just remove the dirty/broken/outdated Homestead VM, reclone it afresh, and reimport your settings file. We will just clone the Github repo:

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

This will create a Homestead.yaml file, placed in your ~/.homestead directory. This settings file can easily be re-initialized by running the init.sh script again, as above.

The alternate way is using Composer to globally install Homestead. This was previously the officially documented approach, at least back during Laravel 4.2. I am not sure I like this approach, but there are articles out there evangelizing the merits of doing this. I would rather modularize my development environments as done the first way, instead of globally invoking Homestead anywhere in my system (how often do you really need to create a new Laravel box, when a single box can capably manage all of your local Laravel projects? Capriciously, running homestead up is annoying when vagrant up is already so ingrained!):

composer global require "laravel/homestead=~2.0"
homestead init

This will create a Homestead.yaml file, placed in your ~/.homestead directory.

SSH key setup

The ~/.homestead/Homestead.yaml file already sets a sane default location for your SSH key; if yours is different then update it. See here to create a key from scratch if it doesn't yet exist.

Shared folders/sites setup

In the ~/.homestead/Homestead.yaml file, map out the path you want access to in your Homestead VM. I keep all my projects and VMs (including this Homestead VM) in a Projects folder, so let's update the `folders` variable using relative paths, and also the sites (of which you can have as many as you want) with the specific Laravel projects you want to access:

folders:
    - map: ../../Projects
      to: /home/vagrant/Projects

sites:
    - map: mylaravel5project.dev
      to: /home/vagrant/Projects/mylaravel5project/public

Hosts file setup

If you want to access your project in the browser with a pretty name instead of Homestead's default IP, http://192.168.10.10/, be sure to define some hosts for easier access.

Alias setup

To add Bash aliases to your Homestead box, simply add to the aliases file in the root of the ~/.homestead directory.

Create a Laravel Project

composer create-project laravel/laravel projectname

Launch!

Simply run:

vagrant up

To destroy the VM and start fresh, run:

vagrant destroy --force

To SSH into Homestead when it is running, from the Homestead cloned directory, run:

vagrant ssh

Now we are set to visit http://192.168.10.10/ and will see the first mapped Laravel project's main page. If several apps were specified in the Homestead.yaml file's sites, and hosts file definitions were set for all of them, you can access each of them individually via those mapped URLs (i.e. mylaravel5project.dev). Enjoy!