Laravel 5 Homestead Workflow

This post will be a little obscure to you, if you have no previous knowledge of Vagrant or Homestead, I recommend laravel’s homestead guide and also the official vagrant guide

Download laravel’s vagrant box

first we download vagrant box for laravel,

vagrant box add laravel/homestead

this will download the box named "laravel/homestead" from HashiCorp’s Atlas box catalog and add it to your vagrant’s box list. You can verify the box exist by running:

$ vagrant box list
laravel/homestead               (virtualbox, 0.2.7)
puppetlabs/centos-7.0-64-puppet (virtualbox, 1.0.1)

or verify your vagrant.d path

$ ls ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/laravel*
laravel-VAGRANTSLASH-homestead/   

if you encounter any problems, download the box directly from HashiCorp’s Atlas box catalog and add it like this:

vagrant box add laravel/homestead path/to/your/box/file.box

Homestead’s workflow

Homestead’s official workflow is that you clone homestead to your local environment, and bootstrap it to your local environment,

cd Projectfolder
git clone https://github.com/laravel/homestead.git Homestead
bash init.sh

this will essentially create the Homestead.yaml and place it in your ~/.homestead directory, subsequently this will allow you to map each project folder to the same homestead box

folders:
    - map: ~/Code
      to: /home/vagrant/Code

My Homestead structure

I favor keeping a single homestead box per project.

• This to me follows the vagrant practice of saving your vagrant file to your project, but excluding your .vagrant from your git repository.
• This also allows me to keep a Homestead.yaml inside my project folder, but separate from the actual Homestead project folder, following, their own convention of bash init.sh that copies the Homestead.yaml from the source the root of the Homestead folder.

Directory structure:

├── projectfolder/
│   ├── Homestead.yaml       # homestead config saved in project root
│   ├── public/
│   ├── Homestead/           # homestead project, also ignored in git
│   │   ├── Homestead.yaml
│   │   ├── LICENSE.txt
│   │   ├── Vagrantfile
│   │   ├── composer.json
│   │   ├── composer.lock
│   │   ├── homestead
│   │   ├── init.sh
│   │   ├── readme.md
│   │   ├── scripts/
│   │   ├── src/
│   │   │   └── stubs/     # homestead source configs, good reference for version changes
│   │   │       ├── Homestead.yaml
│   │   │       ├── LocalizedVagrantfile
│   │   │       ├── after.sh
│   │   │       └── aliases
│   │   └── vendor         # vendor required to bootstrap application

create homestead folder in the root of your project.

cd Projectfolder
git clone https://github.com/laravel/homestead.git Homestead
mkdir -p Homestead/.homestead

exclude Homestead from .gitignore this now comes default with L5.1

echo 'Homestead' >> .gitignore

import or create your current Homestead.yaml to the newly cloned Homestead

cp Homestead.yaml Homestead/
OR
cp Homestead/src/stubs/Homestead.yaml Homestead

inside Homestead/Vagrantfile set the Homestead path

confDir = $confDir ||= File.expand_path("../Homestead")

and if you intend on keeping several homestead instances like me, do the following and define Homestead’s default name

...
config.vm.define "laravel5dev" do |laravel5dev|
    end

    if File.exists? afterScriptPath then
        config.vm.provision "shell", path: afterScriptPath
    end

create keys, that will allow you to ssh into vagrant box,

cd Projectfolder
ssh-keygen -t rsa -f "Homestead/.homestead/homestead@laravel5.dev" -C "homestead@laravel5.dev"

that’s it, at this point you are ready for configuring our vm.

after configuration, we install the composer dependencies on Homestead and call ./homestead from Homestead directory

cd Homestead/
composer install
./homestead up

now your project is ready and served at: http://localhost:8000, or http://localhost:2200 if port 8000 is busy, or if you are fancy, you can edit you /etc/hosts, and include a line for laravel5.dev

$ sudo vi /etc/hosts
192.168.33.11 laravel5.dev www.laravel5.dev