Introduction
Laravel strives to make the entire PHP development experience delightful, including your local development environment. Vagrant provides a simple, elegant way to manage and provision Virtual Machines.
Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant "box" that provides you a wonderful development environment without requiring you to install PHP, HHVM, 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 5.6, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications.
Note: If you are using Windows, you may need to enable hardware virtualization (VT-x). It can usually be enabled via your BIOS.
Homestead is currently built and tested using Vagrant 1.6.
Included Software
- Ubuntu 14.04
- PHP 5.6
- HHVM
- Nginx
- MySQL
- Postgres
- Node (With Bower, Grunt, and Gulp)
- Redis
- Memcached
- Beanstalkd
- Laravel Envoy
- Fabric + HipChat Extension
Installation & Setup
Installing VirtualBox & Vagrant
Before launching your Homestead environment, you must install VirtualBox and Vagrant. Both of these software packages provide easy-to-use visual installers for all popular operating systems.
Adding The Vagrant Box
Once VirtualBox and Vagrant have been installed, you should add the
laravel/homestead
box to your Vagrant installation using
the following command in your terminal. It will take a few minutes to
download the box, depending on your Internet connection speed:
vagrant box add laravel/homestead
If this fails, you may have an older version of vagrant that requires the url of the box. The following should work:
vagrant box add laravel/homestead https://atlas.hashicorp.com/laravel/boxes/homestead
Installing Homestead
With Composer + PHP Tool
Once the box has been added to your Vagrant installation, you are
ready to install the Homestead CLI tool using the Composer
global
command:
composer global require "laravel/homestead=~2.0"
Make sure to place the ~/.composer/vendor/bin
directory
in your PATH so the homestead
executable is found when you
run the homestead
command in your terminal.
Once you have installed the Homestead CLI tool, run the
init
command to create the Homestead.yaml
configuration file:
homestead init
The Homestead.yaml
file will be placed in the
~/.homestead
directory. If you're using a Mac or Linux
system, you may edit Homestead.yaml
file by running the
homestead edit
command in your terminal:
homestead edit
Manually Via Git (No Local PHP)
Alternatively, if you do not want to install PHP on your local
machine, you may install Homestead manually by simply cloning the
repository. Consider cloning the repository into a central
Homestead
directory where you keep all of your Laravel
projects, as the Homestead box will serve as the host to all of your
Laravel (and PHP) projects:
git clone https://github.com/laravel/homestead.git Homestead
Once you have installed the Homestead CLI tool, run the
bash init.sh
command to create the
Homestead.yaml
configuration file:
bash init.sh
The Homestead.yaml
file will be placed in the
~/.homestead
directory.
Set Your SSH Key
Next, you should edit the Homestead.yaml
file. In this
file, you can configure the path to your public SSH key, as well as the
folders you wish to be shared between your main machine and the
Homestead virtual machine.
Don't have an SSH key? On Mac and Linux, you can generally create an SSH key pair using the following command:
ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "you@homestead"
On Windows, you may install Git and
use the Git Bash
shell included with Git to issue the
command above. Alternatively, you may use PuTTY
and PuTTYgen.
Once you have created a SSH key, specify the key's path in the
authorize
property of your Homestead.yaml
file.
Configure Your Shared Folders
The folders
property of the Homestead.yaml
file lists all of the folders you wish to share with your Homestead
environment. As files within these folders are changed, they will be
kept in sync between your local machine and the Homestead environment.
You may configure as many shared folders as necessary!
Configure Your Nginx Sites
Not familiar with Nginx? No problem. The sites
property
allows you to easily map a "domain" to a folder on your Homestead
environment. A sample site configuration is included in the
Homestead.yaml
file. Again, you may add as many sites to
your Homestead environment as necessary. Homestead can serve as a
convenient, virtualized environment for every Laravel project you are
working on!
You can make any Homestead site use HHVM by setting the hhvm
option
to true
:
sites:
- map: homestead.app
to: /home/vagrant/Code/Laravel/public
hhvm: true
Bash Aliases
To add Bash aliases to your Homestead box, simply add to the
aliases
file in the root of the ~/.homestead
directory.
Launch The Vagrant Box
Once you have edited the Homestead.yaml
to your liking,
run the homestead up
command in your terminal. If you
installed Homestead manually and are not using the PHP
homestead
tool, run vagrant up
from the
directory that contains your cloned Homestead Git repository.
Vagrant will boot the virtual machine, and configure your shared
folders and Nginx sites automatically! To destroy the machine, you may
use the homestead destroy
command. For a complete list of
available Homestead commands, run homestead list
.
Don't forget to add the "domains" for your Nginx sites to the
hosts
file on your machine! The hosts
file
will redirect your requests for the local domains into your Homestead
environment. On Mac and Linux, this file is located at
/etc/hosts
. On Windows, it is located at
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
. The lines you add to
this file will look like the following:
192.168.10.10 homestead.app
Make sure the IP address listed is the one you set in your
Homestead.yaml
file. Once you have added the domain to your
hosts
file, you can access the site via your web
browser!
http://homestead.app
To learn how to connect to your databases, read on!
Daily Usage
Connecting Via SSH
To connect to your Homestead environment via SSH, issue the
homestead ssh
command in your terminal.
Connecting To Your Databases
A homestead
database is configured for both MySQL and
Postgres out of the box. For even more convenience, Laravel's
local
database configuration is set to use this database by
default.
To connect to your MySQL or Postgres database from your main machine
via Navicat or Sequel Pro, you should connect to 127.0.0.1
and port 33060 (MySQL) or 54320 (Postgres). The username and password
for both databases is homestead
/ secret
.
Note: You should only use these non-standard ports when connecting to the databases from your main machine. You will use the default 3306 and 5432 ports in your Laravel database configuration file since Laravel is running within the Virtual Machine.
Adding Additional Sites
Once your Homestead environment is provisioned and running, you may
want to add additional Nginx sites for your Laravel applications. You
can run as many Laravel installations as you wish on a single Homestead
environment. There are two ways to do this: First, you may simply add
the sites to your Homestead.yaml
file and then run
vagrant provision
.
Alternatively, you may use the serve
script that is
available on your Homestead environment. To use the serve
script, SSH into your Homestead environment and run the following
command:
serve domain.app /home/vagrant/Code/path/to/public/directory
Note: After running the
serve
command, do not forget to add the new site to thehosts
file on your main machine!
Ports
The following ports are forwarded to your Homestead environment:
- SSH: 2222 -> Forwards To 22
- HTTP: 8000 -> Forwards To 80
- MySQL: 33060 -> Forwards To 3306
- Postgres: 54320 -> Forwards To 5432