What is Laravel Homestead?
Homestead is the virtualised IDE methodology rather than an individual application.
Homestead provides the ability to publish your Laravel installation to a virtual machine and to manage that environment remotely.
It's perfect as a development environment where you can store your Laravel code on your local workstation and share that folder to the virtual machine.
To add to this, if you're storing your development on a Github repo, or to a cloud drive such as OneDrive, you can use your synchronised drives to store everything and in the case of Github, develop and publish on a Linux box via the shared folder from your Windows machine while writing your code in Visual Studio Code, saving to your Windows workstation machine.
If you ever need to share your code-base you can take a copy of your Homestead configuration, include it with your project files and all someone you're sharing your codebase with needs to do is install Git, VirtualBox and Vagrant, then run the "vagrant up" command from their project directory, which will create your project and set it up the same as your system configuration is set up; simple as that!
Homestead is a great, adaptable Laravel virtualisation tool and will also assist greatly with familiarising yourself with Docker and virtualisation technology.
Installing Git
Firstly we're going to need Git Bash (the bash command line prompt from the Git package), so if you don't already have Git installed, get the latest release version for Windows via the following link:
Installing VirtualBox
Downloading VirtualBox
Installing VirtualBox
Installing Vagrant
To install Vagrant is simple.
Downloading Vagrant
Just download the appropriate installer for your architecture.
Download Vagrant 2.3.4 (amd64)
You need to ensure when running Vagrant and VirtualBox that you have enabled virtualisation in the BIOS of your PC.
Configuring our Homestead environment
To configure our Homestead environment, much the same as a standard Laravel project
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