Lev Lazinskiy

First Steps with Laravel and Homestead

I’m checking out Laravel for the first time. I think they have a very nice web site, but slightly confusing documentation. First I tried to get composer working but the whole experience felt weird. Once I got it sorted out, I had some other issues with my local environment so then I went ahead and started to read about Homestead.

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.

This was a bit more promising, since Vagrant makes everything dead simple. I was a bit surprised that the docs suggested creating a single Homestead box and sharing it across all of your Laravel projects since this is a practice that I have not seen before.

I went ahead and did what I usually do and create a Vagrant box for my specific project. It’s been many years since I have written any “real” PHP, looking forward to seeing what Laravel has to offer.