Introduction

Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant box that provides you a wonderful development environment without requiring you to install PHP, a web server, and any other server software on your local machine. No more worrying about messing up your operating system! Vagrant boxes are completely disposable. If something goes wrong, you can destroy and re-create the box in minutes!

Homestead runs on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system, and includes the Nginx web server, PHP 8.0, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, Node, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications.

Official documentation is located here.

Ubuntu 20.04 can be found in the branch 20.04

Ubuntu LTS	Settler Version	Homestead Version	Branch	Status
20.04	11.x	12.x	main	Development/Unstable
20.04	11.x	12.x	release	Stable

Developing Homestead

To keep any in-development changes separate from other Homestead installations, create a new project and install Homestead from composer, forcing it to use a git checkout.

$ mkdir homestead && \
    cd homestead && \
    composer require --prefer-source laravel/homestead:dev-main

After it's complete, vendor/laravel/homestead will be a git checkout and can be used normally.

Extensions

phpMyAdmin

Map site in Homestead.yaml:

- map: phpmyadmin.local
  to: /home/vagrant/phpmyadmin
  php: '8.0'

Add site to main machine hosts file

192.168.10.10           phpmyadmin.local

Login:

• user: homestead
• password: secret

sendmail

• Not required for Laravel. Mail configuration is set in the project .env
• Send test email echo "test message" | sendmail -v youremail@gmail.com (this could take several minutes to receive)

apache2

• Used for 301 redirects

• Disable nginx sudo systemctl stop nginx

• sudo vi /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

• Update <Directory /> block

    <Directory />
            Options FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride All
            Require all granted
    </Directory>
  

• Add site conf sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/sitename.local.conf

    <VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin email@email.com
        DocumentRoot /home/vagrant/sitename/public
        ServerName sitename.local
    </VirtualHost>
  

• Add symlink to sites-enabled sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/sitename.local.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/sitename.local.conf

• Restart apache sudo systemctl restart apache2

Config

• Setup a key ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "you@homestead"

Homestead.yaml

folders:
    - map: 'C:/Users/YourUser/LaravelApps/sitename'
      to: /home/vagrant/sitename
sites:
    - map: sitename.local
      to: /home/vagrant/sitename/public
      php: '7.3'
databases:
    - sitename
features:
    - mariadb: true

• SilverStripe sites will typically use php 7.3
• Laravel apps will typically use php 7.4

Start Homestead

• Run vagrant up --provision
• Run vagrant ssh

PHP Versions

Composer

• Run composer with different versions of PHP php7.3 /usr/local/bin/composer update

Artisan

• Run artisan with different versions of PHP php7.4 artisan migrate