Laravel Homestead
- Introduction
- Installation & Setup
- Daily Usage
- Network Interfaces
- Updating Homestead
- Old Versions
- Provider Specific Settings
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, 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 7.1, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, Node, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications.
If you are using Windows, you may need to enable hardware virtualization (VT-x). It can usually be enabled via your BIOS. If you are using Hyper-V on a UEFI system you may additionally need to disable Hyper-V in order to access VT-x.
Included Software
- Ubuntu 16.04
- Git
- PHP 7.1
- Nginx
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- Sqlite3
- Postgres
- Composer
- Node (With Yarn, Bower, Grunt, and Gulp)
- Redis
- Memcached
- Beanstalkd
- Mailhog
- ngrok
Installation & Setup
First Steps
Before launching your Homestead environment, you must install VirtualBox 5.1, VMWare, or Parallels as well as Vagrant. All of these software packages provide easy-to-use visual installers for all popular operating systems.
To use the VMware provider, you will need to purchase both VMware Fusion / Workstation and the VMware Vagrant plug-in. Though it is not free, VMware can provide faster shared folder performance out of the box.
To use the Parallels provider, you will need to install Parallels Vagrant plug-in. It is free of charge.
Installing The Homestead 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, make sure your Vagrant installation is up to date.
Installing Homestead
You may install Homestead 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 projects:
cd ~ git clone https://github.com/laravel/homestead.git Homestead
You should check out a tagged version of Homestead since the master
branch may not always be stable. You can find the latest stable version on the GitHub Release Page:
cd Homestead // Clone the desired release...git checkout v6.1.0
Once you have cloned the Homestead repository, run the bash init.sh
command from the Homestead directory to create the Homestead.yaml
configuration file. The Homestead.yaml
file will be placed in the Homestead directory:
// Mac / Linux...bash init.sh // Windows...init.bat
Configuring Homestead
Setting Your Provider
The provider
key in your Homestead.yaml
file indicates which Vagrant provider should be used: virtualbox
, vmware_fusion
, vmware_workstation
, or parallels
. You may set this to the provider you prefer:
provider: virtualbox
Configuring 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:
folders: - map: ~/Code to: /home/vagrant/Code
To enable NFS, you only need to add a simple flag to your synced folder configuration:
folders: - map: ~/Code to: /home/vagrant/Code type: "nfs"
When using NFS, you should consider installing the vagrant-bindfs plug-in. This plug-in will maintain the correct user / group permissions for files and directories within the Homestead box.
You may also pass any options supported by Vagrant's Synced Folders by listing them under the options
key:
folders: - map: ~/Code to: /home/vagrant/Code type: "rsync" options: rsync__args: ["--verbose", "--archive", "--delete", "-zz"] rsync__exclude: ["node_modules"]
Configuring 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:
sites: - map: homestead.app to: /home/vagrant/Code/Laravel/public
If you change the sites
property after provisioning the Homestead box, you should re-run vagrant reload --provision
to update the Nginx configuration on the virtual machine.
The Hosts File
You must add the "domains" for your Nginx sites to the hosts
file on your machine. The hosts
file will redirect requests for your Homestead sites into your Homestead machine. 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 set in your Homestead.yaml
file. Once you have added the domain to your hosts
file and launched the Vagrant box you will be able to access the site via your web browser:
http://homestead.app
Launching 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 automatically configure your shared folders and Nginx sites.
To destroy the machine, you may use the vagrant destroy --force
command.
Per Project Installation
Instead of installing Homestead globally and sharing the same Homestead box across all of your projects, you may instead configure a Homestead instance for each project you manage. Installing Homestead per project may be beneficial if you wish to ship a Vagrantfile
with your project, allowing others working on the project to simply vagrant up
.
To install Homestead directly into your project, require it using Composer:
composer require laravel/homestead --dev
Once Homestead has been installed, use the make
command to generate the Vagrantfile
and Homestead.yaml
file in your project root. The make
command will automatically configure the sites
and folders
directives in the Homestead.yaml
file.
Mac / Linux:
php vendor/bin/homestead make
Windows:
vendor\\bin\\homestead make
Next, run the vagrant up
command in your terminal and access your project at http://homestead.app
in your browser. Remember, you will still need to add an /etc/hosts
file entry for homestead.app
or the domain of your choice.
Installing MariaDB
If you prefer to use MariaDB instead of MySQL, you may add the mariadb
option to your Homestead.yaml
file. This option will remove MySQL and install MariaDB. MariaDB serves as a drop-in replacement for MySQL so you should still use the mysql
database driver in your application's database configuration:
box: laravel/homesteadip: "192.168.20.20"memory: 2048cpus: 4provider: virtualboxmariadb: true
Daily Usage
Accessing Homestead Globally
Sometimes you may want to vagrant up
your Homestead machine from anywhere on your filesystem. You can do this on Mac / Linux systems by adding a Bash function to your Bash profile. On Windows, you may accomplish this by adding a "batch" file to your PATH
. These scripts will allow you to run any Vagrant command from anywhere on your system and will automatically point that command to your Homestead installation:
Mac / Linux
function homestead() { ( cd ~/Homestead && vagrant $* )}
Make sure to tweak the ~/Homestead
path in the function to the location of your actual Homestead installation. Once the function is installed, you may run commands like homestead up
or homestead ssh
from anywhere on your system.
Windows
Create a homestead.bat
batch file anywhere on your machine with the following contents:
@echo off set cwd=%cd%set homesteadVagrant=C:\Homestead cd /d %homesteadVagrant% && vagrant %*cd /d %cwd% set cwd=set homesteadVagrant=
Make sure to tweak the example C:\Homestead
path in the script to the actual location of your Homestead installation. After creating the file, add the file location to your PATH
. You may then run commands like homestead up
or homestead ssh
from anywhere on your system.
Connecting Via SSH
You can SSH into your virtual machine by issuing the vagrant ssh
terminal command from your Homestead directory.
But, since you will probably need to SSH into your Homestead machine frequently, consider adding the "function" described above to your host machine to quickly SSH into the Homestead box.
Connecting To Databases
A homestead
database is configured for both MySQL and Postgres out of the box. For even more convenience, Laravel's .env
file configures the framework to use this database out of the box.
To connect to your MySQL or Postgres database from your host machine's database client, 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
.
You should only use these non-standard ports when connecting to the databases from your host 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. To add an additional site, simply add the site to your Homestead.yaml
file:
sites: - map: homestead.app to: /home/vagrant/Code/Laravel/public - map: another.app to: /home/vagrant/Code/another/public
If Vagrant is not automatically managing your "hosts" file, you may need to add the new site to that file as well:
192.168.10.10 homestead.app192.168.10.10 another.app
Once the site has been added, run the vagrant reload --provision
command from your Homestead directory.
Site Types
Homestead supports several types of sites which allow you to easily run projects that are not based on Laravel. For example, we may easily add a Symfony application to Homestead using the symfony2
site type:
sites: - map: symfony2.app to: /home/vagrant/Code/Symfony/public type: symfony2
The available site types are: apache
, laravel
(the default), proxy
, silverstripe
, statamic
, symfony2
, and symfony4
.
Site Parameters
You may add additional Nginx fastcgi_param
values to your site via the params
site directive. For example, we'll add a FOO
parameter with a value of BAR
:
sites: - map: homestead.app to: /home/vagrant/Code/Laravel/public params: - key: FOO value: BAR
Configuring Cron Schedules
Laravel provides a convenient way to schedule Cron jobs by scheduling a single schedule:run
Artisan command to be run every minute. The schedule:run
command will examine the job schedule defined in your App\Console\Kernel
class to determine which jobs should be run.
If you would like the schedule:run
command to be run for a Homestead site, you may set the schedule
option to true
when defining the site:
sites: - map: homestead.app to: /home/vagrant/Code/Laravel/public schedule: true
The Cron job for the site will be defined in the /etc/cron.d
folder of the virtual machine.
Ports
By default, 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
- Mailhog: 8025 → Forwards To 8025
Forwarding Additional Ports
If you wish, you may forward additional ports to the Vagrant box, as well as specify their protocol:
ports: - send: 50000 to: 5000 - send: 7777 to: 777 protocol: udp
Sharing Your Environment
Sometimes you may wish to share what you're currently working on with coworkers or a client. Vagrant has a built-in way to support this via vagrant share
; however, this will not work if you have multiple sites configured in your Homestead.yaml
file.
To solve this problem, Homestead includes its own share
command. To get started, SSH into your Homestead machine via vagrant ssh
and run share homestead.app
. This will share the homestead.app
site from your Homestead.yaml
configuration file. Of course, you may substitute any of your other configured sites for homestead.app
:
share homestead.app
After running the command, you will see an Ngrok screen appear which contains the activity log and the publicly accessible URLs for the shared site. If you would like to specify a custom region, subdomain, or other Ngrok runtime option, you may add them to your share
command:
share homestead.app -region=eu -subdomain=laravel
Remember, Vagrant is inherently insecure and you are exposing your virtual machine to the Internet when running the share
command.
Multiple PHP Versions
This feature is only compatible with Nginx.
Homestead 6 introduced support for multiple versions of PHP on the same virtual machine. You may specify which version of PHP to use for a given site within your Homestead.yaml
file. The available PHP versions are: "5.6", "7.0", and "7.1":
sites: - map: homestead.app to: /home/vagrant/Code/Laravel/public php: "5.6"
In addition, you may use any of the supported PHP versions via the CLI:
php5.6 artisan listphp7.0 artisan listphp7.1 artisan list
Network Interfaces
The networks
property of the Homestead.yaml
configures network interfaces for your Homestead environment. You may configure as many interfaces as necessary:
networks: - type: "private_network" ip: "192.168.10.20"
To enable a bridged interface, configure a bridge
setting and change the network type to public_network
:
networks: - type: "public_network" ip: "192.168.10.20" bridge: "en1: Wi-Fi (AirPort)"
To enable DHCP, just remove the ip
option from your configuration:
networks: - type: "public_network" bridge: "en1: Wi-Fi (AirPort)"
Updating Homestead
You can update Homestead in two simple steps. First, you should update the Vagrant box using the vagrant box update
command:
vagrant box update
Next, you need to update the Homestead source code. If you cloned the repository you can simply git pull origin master
at the location you originally cloned the repository.
If you have installed Homestead via your project's composer.json
file, you should ensure your composer.json
file contains "laravel/homestead": "^4"
and update your dependencies:
composer update
Old Versions
If you need an older version of PHP check the documentation on multiple PHP versions before attempting to use an old version of Homestead.
You can easily override the version of the box that Homestead uses by adding the following line to your Homestead.yaml
file:
version: 0.6.0
An example:
box: laravel/homesteadversion: 0.6.0ip: "192.168.20.20"memory: 2048cpus: 4provider: virtualbox
When you use an older version of the Homestead box you need to match that with a compatible version of the Homestead source code. Below is a chart which shows the supported box versions, which version of Homestead source code to use, and the version of PHP provided:
Homestead Version | Box Version | |
---|---|---|
PHP 7.0 | 3.1.0 | 0.6.0 |
PHP 7.1 | 4.0.0 | 1.0.0 |
PHP 7.1 | 5.0.0 | 2.0.0 |
PHP 7.1 | 6.0.0 | 3.0.0 |
Provider Specific Settings
VirtualBox
By default, Homestead configures the natdnshostresolver
setting to on
. This allows Homestead to use your host operating system's DNS settings. If you would like to override this behavior, add the following lines to your Homestead.yaml
file:
provider: virtualboxnatdnshostresolver: off