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 1.7.
Included Software
- Ubuntu 14.04
- PHP 5.6
- HHVM
- Nginx
- MySQL
- Postgres
- Node (With Bower, Grunt, and Gulp)
- Redis
- Memcached
- Beanstalkd
- Laravel Envoy
- Blackfire Profiler
Installation & Setup
Installing VirtualBox / VMware & 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.
VMware
In addition to VirtualBox, Homestead also supports VMware. To use the VMware provider, you will need to purchase both VMware Fusion / Desktop and the VMware Vagrant plug-in. VMware provides much faster shared folder performance out of the box.
Adding The Vagrant Box
Once VirtualBox / VMware 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 command fails, you may have an old version of Vagrant that requires the full URL:
vagrant box add laravel/homestead https://atlas.hashicorp.com/laravel/boxes/homestead
Installing Homestead
You may install Homestead manually by simply cloning the repository.
Consider cloning the repository into a Homestead
folder
within your "home" directory, 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 cloned the Homestead repository, run the
bash init.sh
command from the Homestead directory to create
the Homestead.yaml
configuration file:
bash init.sh
The Homestead.yaml
file will be placed in your
~/.homestead
directory.
Configure Your Provider
The provider
key in your Homestead.yaml
file indicates which Vagrant provider should be used:
virtualbox
, vmware_fusion
(Mac OS X) or
vmware_workstation
(Windows). You may set this to whichever
provider you prefer.
provider: virtualbox
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!
To enable NFS, just add a simple flag to your synced folder:
folders:
- map: ~/Code
to: /home/vagrant/Code
type: "nfs"
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
Each site will be accessible by HTTP via port 8000 and HTTPS via port 44300.
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 vagrant up
command from your Homestead
directory.
Vagrant will boot the virtual machine, and configure your shared
folders and Nginx sites automatically! To destroy the machine, you may
use the vagrant destroy --force
command.
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
Since you will probably need to SSH into your Homestead machine frequently, consider creating an "alias" on your host machine to quickly SSH into the Homestead box:
alias vm="ssh vagrant@127.0.0.1 -p 2222"
Once you create this alias, you can simply use the "vm" command to SSH into your Homestead machine from anywhere on your system.
Alternatively, you can use the vagrant ssh
command from
your Homestead directory.
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
from your Homestead directory.
Note: This process is destructive. When running the
provision
command, your existing databases will be destroyed and recreated.
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 80
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
- HTTPS: 44300 → Forwards To 443
- MySQL: 33060 → Forwards To 3306
- Postgres: 54320 → Forwards To 5432
Adding Additional Ports
If you wish, you may forward additional ports to the Vagrant box, as well as specify their protocol:
ports:
- send: 93000
to: 9300
- send: 7777
to: 777
protocol: udp
Blackfire Profiler
Blackfire Profiler by SensioLabs automatically gathers data about your code's execution, such as RAM, CPU time, and disk I/O. Homestead makes it a breeze to use this profiler for your own applications.
All of the proper packages have already been installed on your
Homestead box, you simply need to set a Blackfire
Server ID and token in your Homestead.yaml
file:
blackfire:
- id: your-server-id
token: your-server-token
client-id: your-client-id
client-token: your-client-token
Once you have configured your Blackfire credentials, re-provision the
box using vagrant provision
from your Homestead directory.
Of course, be sure to review the Blackfire documentation
to learn how to install the Blackfire companion extension for your web
browser.