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, and Linux, and includes the Nginx web server, PHP 5.5, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications.
Homestead if currently built and tested using Vagrant 1.6.
- Ubuntu 14.04
- PHP 5.5
- Nginx
- MySQL
- Postgres
- Node (With Bower, Grunt, and Gulp)
- Redis
- Memcached
- Beanstalkd
- Laravel Envoy
- Fabric + HipChat Extension
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.
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
Once the box has been added to your Vagrant installation, you should clone or download this 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
Next, you should edit the Homestead.yaml file included in the repository. 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 "your@email.com"
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.
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!
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 environemnt for every Laravel project you are working on!
To add Bash aliases to your Homestead box, simply add to the aliases file in the root of the Homestead directory.
Once you have edited the Homestead.yaml to your liking, run the vagrant up command from the Homestead directory in your terminal. Vagrant will boot the virtual machine, and configure your shared folders and Nginx sites automatically!
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:
127.0.0.1 homestead.app
Once you have added the domain to your hosts file, you can access the site via your web browser on port 8000!
http://homestead.app:8000
To learn how to connect to your databases, read on!
To connect to your Homestead environment via SSH, you should connect to 127.0.0.1 on port 2222 using the SSH key you specified in your Homestead.yaml file. You may also simply run the vagrant ssh command from your Homestead directory.
If you want even more convenience, it can be helpful to add the following alias to your ~/.bash_aliases or ~/.bash_profile:
alias vm='ssh vagrant@127.0.0.1 -p 2222'
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.
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 installation 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
servecommand, do not forget to add the new site to thehostsfile on your main machine!
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