easylaravel-sample

Chapter 1. Introducing Laravel 9
In recent years virtual machines dramatically lowered this bar. A virtual machine is a softwarebased
implementation of a computer that can be run inside the confines of another computer (such
as your laptop), or even inside another virtual machine. This is incredible technology, because for
instance you can use a virtual machine to run an Ubuntu Linux server on your Windows 10 laptop,
or vice versa. Further, it’s possible to create a customized virtual machine image preloaded with
a select set of software. This image can then be distributed to fellow developers, who can run the
virtual machine and take advantage of the custom software configuration. This is precisely what the
Laravel developers have done with Homestead²⁰, a virtual machine which bundles everything you
need to get started building Laravel-driven websites.
Homestead is currently based on Ubuntu 16.04, and includes everything you need to get started
building Laravel applications, including PHP 7.0, Nginx, MySQL, PostgreSQL and a variety of other
useful utilities such as Redis and Memcached. It runs flawlessly on OS X, Linux and Windows,
and the installation process is very straightforward, meaning in most cases you’ll be able to begin
managing Laravel applications in less than 30 minutes.
Mac users have another option at their disposal when it comes to locally hosting a Laravel
application. It’s called Valet, and later in this chapter I’ll introduce Valet. If you’re looking
for a no-frills hosting environment during the development process, Valet is way to go
although for most readers I still recommend spending the extra time and effort required to
install Homestead because of all the additional features it has to offer.
Installing Homestead
Homestead requires Vagrant²¹ and VirtualBox²². User-friendly installers are available for all of
the common operating systems, including OS X, Linux and Windows. Take a moment now to
install Vagrant and VirtualBox. Once complete, open a terminal window and execute the following
command:
1 $ vagrant box add laravel/homestead
2 ==> box: Loading metadata for box 'laravel/homestead'
3 box: URL: https://atlas.hashicorp.com/laravel/homestead
4 This box can work with multiple providers! The providers that it
5 can work with are listed below. Please review the list and choose
6 the provider you will be working with.
7
8 1) virtualbox
9 2) vmware_desktop
10
²⁰http://laravel.com/docs/homestead
²¹http://www.vagrantup.com/
²²https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads