- Introduction
- Installation & Setup
- Daily Usage
- Debugging & Profiling
- Network Interfaces
- Extending Homestead
- Updating Homestead
- Provider Specific Settings
Homestead is a 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 8.0, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, Node, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications.
For a full list see https://github.com/torann/settler.
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.
1. Open command prompt as Administrator
2. Run bcdedit
to check hypervisor status:
3. Check hypervisor launch type:
4. If is set to auto then disable it:
bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off
5. Reboot host machine and launch VirtualBox again
Before launching your Homestead environment, you must install VirtualBox as well as Vagrant. All of these software packages provide easy-to-use visual installers for all popular operating systems.
Because of Vagrant limitations, The Hyper-V provider ignores all networking settings.
You may install Homestead by cloning the repository onto your host machine. 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:
git clone https://github.com/torann/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
// Optional - clone the desired release...
git checkout 1.0.1
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
Once VirtualBox and Vagrant have been installed, you should add the torann/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 torann/homestead
If this command fails, make sure your Vagrant installation is up to date.
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/project1
to: /home/vagrant/project1
Windows users should not use the
~/
path syntax and instead should use the full path to their project, such asC:\Users\user\Code\project1
.
You should always map individual projects to their own folder mapping instead of mapping your entire ~/code
folder. When you map a folder the virtual machine must keep track of all disk IO for every file in the folder. This leads to performance issues if you have a large number of files in a folder.
folders:
- map: ~/code/project1
to: /home/vagrant/project1
- map: ~/code/project2
to: /home/vagrant/project2
You should never mount
.
(the current directory) when using Homestead. This causes Vagrant to not map the current folder to/vagrant
and will break optional features and cause unexpected results while provisioning.
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 on Windows, you should consider installing the vagrant-winnfsd 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"]
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.local
to: /home/vagrant/code/my-project/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.
NOTE Homestead scripts are built to be as idempotent as possible. However, if you are experiencing issues while provisioning you should destroy and rebuild the machine via
vagrant destroy && vagrant up
.
Homestead starts several services by default; however, you may customize which services are enabled or disabled during provisioning. For example, you may enable PostgreSQL and disable MySQL:
services:
- enabled:
- "postgresql@12-main"
- disabled:
- "mysql"
The specified services will be started or stopped based on their order in the enabled
and disabled
directives.
Homestead publishes hostnames over mDNS
for automatic host resolution. If you set hostname: homestead
in your Homestead.yaml
file, the host will be available at homestead.local
. MacOS, iOS, and Linux desktop distributions include mDNS
support by default. Windows requires installing Bonjour Print Services for Windows.
Using automatic hostnames works best for "per project" installations of Homestead. If you host multiple sites on a single Homestead instance, you may add the "domains" for your web 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.local
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.local
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.
Optional software is installed using the "features" setting in your Homestead configuration file. Most features can be enabled or disabled with a boolean value, while some features allow multiple configuration options:
features:
- blackfire:
server_id: "server_id"
server_token: "server_value"
client_id: "client_id"
client_token: "client_value"
- chronograf: true
- couchdb: true
- crystal: true
- docker: true
- elasticsearch:
version: 7.9.0
- gearman: true
- golang: true
- grafana: true
- influxdb: true
- mariadb: true
- meilisearch: true
- minio: true
- mongodb: true
- neo4j: true
- ohmyzsh: true
- openresty: true
- pm2: true
- python: true
- rabbitmq: true
- solr: true
Enabling MariaDB 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.
The default MongoDB installation will set the database username to homestead
and the corresponding password to secret
.
You may specify a supported version of Elasticsearch, which may be a major version or an exact version number (major.minor.patch). The default installation will create a cluster named 'homestead'. You should never give Elasticsearch more than half of the operating system's memory, so make sure your Homestead machine has at least twice the Elasticsearch allocation.
Check out the Elasticsearch documentation to learn how to customize your configuration.
The default Neo4j installation will set the database username to homestead
and corresponding password to secret
. To access the Neo4j browser, visit http://homestead.test:7474
via your web browser. The ports 7687
(Bolt), 7474
(HTTP), and 7473
(HTTPS) are ready to serve requests from the Neo4j client.
You may add Bash aliases to your Homestead machine by modifying the aliases
file within your Homestead directory:
alias c='clear'
alias ..='cd ..'
After you have updated the aliases
file, you should re-provision the Homestead machine using the vagrant reload --provision
command. This will ensure that your new aliases are available on the machine.
Tip when updating Homestead it's a good idea to check for any changes made to the base alias file
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:
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.
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.
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.
A homestead
database is configured for both MySQL and PostgreSQL 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 PostgreSQL database from your host machine's database client, you should connect to 127.0.0.1
and port 33060
(MySQL) or 54320
(PostgreSQL). 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.
Homestead can automatically backup your database when your Vagrant box is destroyed. To utilize this feature, you must be using Vagrant 2.1.0 or greater. Or, if you are using an older version of Vagrant, you must install the vagrant-triggers
plug-in. To enable automatic database backups, add the following line to your Homestead.yaml
file:
backup: true
Once configured, Homestead will export your databases to mysql_backup
and postgres_backup
directories when the vagrant destroy
command is executed. These directories can be found in the folder where you cloned Homestead.
To enable WebSockets for a site simply add the following line to the site map for each site needing WebSockets:
sites:
- map: homestead.local
to: /home/vagrant/code/public
websockets: 'true'
In the above example WebSockets are enabled for
homestead.local
Homestead supports freezing the state of MySQL and MariaDB databases and branching between them using Logical MySQL Manager. For example, imagine working on a site with a multi-gigabyte database. You can import the database and take a snapshot. After doing some work and creating some test content locally, you may quickly restore back to the original state.
Under the hood, LMM uses LVM's thin snapshot functionality with copy-on-write support. In practice, this means that changing a single row in a table will only cause the changes you made to be written to disk, saving significant time and disk space during restores.
Since lmm
interacts with LVM, it must be run as root
. To see all available commands, run sudo lmm
inside your Vagrant box. A common workflow looks like the following:
- Import a database into the default
master
lmm branch. - Save a snapshot of the unchanged database using
sudo lmm branch prod-YYYY-MM-DD
. - Modify the database.
- Run
sudo lmm merge prod-YYYY-MM-DD
to undo all changes. - Run
sudo lmm delete <branch>
to delete unneeded branches.
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, add the site to your Homestead.yaml
file:
sites:
- map: homestead.local
to: /home/vagrant/code/my-project/public
- map: another.local
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.local
192.168.10.10 another.local
Once the site has been added, run the vagrant reload --provision
command from your Homestead directory.
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 single page application to Homestead using the spa
site type:
sites:
- map: rails.local
to: /home/vagrant/code/spa
type: "spa"
The available site types are: laravel
(the default), proxy
, and spa
.
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.local
to: /home/vagrant/code/my-project/public
params:
- key: FOO
value: BAR
You can set global environment variables by adding them to your Homestead.yaml
file:
variables:
- key: APP_ENV
value: local
- key: FOO
value: bar
After updating the Homestead.yaml
, be sure to re-provision the machine by running vagrant reload --provision
. This will update the PHP-FPM configuration for all of the installed PHP versions and also update the environment for the vagrant
user.
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.local
to: /home/vagrant/code/my-project/public
schedule: true
The Cron job for the site will be defined in the /etc/cron.d
folder of the virtual machine.
Mailhog allows you to easily catch your outgoing email and examine it without actually sending the mail to its recipients. To get started, update your .env
file to use the following mail settings:
MAIL_DRIVER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=localhost
MAIL_PORT=1025
MAIL_USERNAME=null
MAIL_PASSWORD=null
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=null
Once Mailhog has been configured, you may access the Mailhog dashboard at http://localhost:8025
.
Minio is an open source object storage server with an Amazon S3 compatible API. To install Minio, update your Homestead.yaml
file with the following configuration option:
minio: true
By default, Minio is available on port 9600. You may access the Minio control panel by visiting http://homestead:9600/
. The default access key is homestead
, while the default secret key is secretkey
. When accessing Minio, you should always use region us-east-1
.
In order to use Minio you will need to adjust the S3 disk configuration in your config/filesystems.php
configuration file. You will need to add the use_path_style_endpoint
option to the disk configuration, as well as change the url
key to endpoint
:
's3' => [
'driver' => 's3',
'key' => env('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'),
'secret' => env('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'),
'region' => env('AWS_DEFAULT_REGION'),
'bucket' => env('AWS_BUCKET'),
'endpoint' => env('AWS_URL'),
'use_path_style_endpoint' => true
]
Finally, ensure your .env
file has the following options:
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=homestead
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=secretkey
AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-1
AWS_URL=http://homestead:9600
To provision buckets, add a buckets
directive to your Homestead configuration file:
buckets:
- name: your-bucket
policy: public
- name: your-private-bucket
policy: none
Supported policy
values include: none
, download
, upload
, and public
.
By default, the following ports are forwarded to your Homestead environment:
- SSH: 2222 → Forwards To 22
- ngrok UI: 4040 → Forwards To 4040
- HTTP: 8000 → Forwards To 80
- HTTPS: 44300 → Forwards To 443
- MySQL: 33060 → Forwards To 3306
- PostgreSQL: 54320 → Forwards To 5432
- MongoDB: 27017 → Forwards To 27017
- Mailhog: 8025 → Forwards To 8025
- Minio: 9600 → Forwards To 9600
- Websockets: 8022 → Forwards To 8022
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
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.local
. This will share the homestead.local
site from your Homestead.yaml
configuration file. You may substitute any of your other configured sites for homestead.local
:
share homestead.local
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.local -region=eu -subdomain=laravel
Remember, Vagrant is inherently insecure and you are exposing your virtual machine to the Internet when running the
share
command.
Homestead supports 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: "7.4" and "8.0" (the default):
sites:
- map: homestead.test
to: /home/vagrant/project1/public
php: "7.4"
In addition, you may use any of the supported PHP versions via the CLI:
php7.4 artisan list
php8.0 artisan list
You may also update the default CLI version by issuing the following commands from within your Homestead virtual machine:
php74
php80
Homestead includes the Postfix mail transfer agent, which is listening on port 1025
by default. So, you may instruct your application to use the smtp
mail driver on localhost
port 1025
. Then, all sent mail will be handled by Postfix and caught by Mailhog. To view your sent emails, open http://localhost:8025 in your web browser.
Homestead includes support for step debugging using Xdebug. For example, you can load a web page from a browser, and PHP will connect to your IDE to allow inspection and modification of the running code.
To enable debugging, run the following commands inside your Vagrant box:
sudo phpenmod xdebug
# Update this command to match your PHP version...
sudo systemctl restart php8.0-fpm
Next, follow your IDE's instructions to enable debugging. Finally, configure your browser to trigger Xdebug with an extension or bookmarklet.
Xdebug causes PHP to run significantly slower. To disable Xdebug, run
sudo phpdismod xdebug
within your Vagrant box and restart the FPM service.
To debug a PHP CLI application, use the xphp
shell alias inside your Vagrant box:
xphp path/to/script
When debugging functional tests that make requests to the web server, it is easier to autostart debugging rather than modifying tests to pass through a custom header or cookie to trigger debugging. To force Xdebug to start automatically, modify /etc/php/7.#/fpm/conf.d/20-xdebug.ini
inside your Vagrant box and add the following configuration:
; If Homestead.yml contains a different subnet for the IP address, this address may be different...
xdebug.remote_host = 192.168.10.1
xdebug.remote_autostart = 1
XHGui is a user interface for exploring the performance of your PHP applications. To enable XHGui, add xhgui: 'true'
to your site configuration:
sites:
-
map: your-site.local
to: /home/vagrant/code/web
xhgui: 'true'
If the site already exists, make sure to run vagrant provision
after updating your configuration.
To profile a web request, add xhgui=on
as a query parameter to a request. XHGui will automatically attach a cookie to the response so that subsequent requests do not need the query string value. You may view your application profile results by browsing to http://your-site.local/xhgui
.
To profile a CLI request using XHGui, prefix the command with XHGUI=on
:
XHGUI=on path/to/script
CLI profile results may be viewed in the same way as web profile results.
Note that the act of profiling slows down script execution, and absolute times may be as much as twice as real-world requests. Therefore, always compare percentage improvements and not absolute numbers. Also, be aware the execution time includes any time spent paused in a debugger.
Since performance profiles take up significant disk space, they are deleted automatically after a few days.
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)"
You may extend Homestead using the after.sh
script in the root of your Homestead directory. Within this file, you may add any shell commands that are necessary to properly configure and customize your virtual machine.
When customizing Homestead, Ubuntu may ask you if you would like to keep a package's original configuration or overwrite it with a new configuration file. To avoid this, you should use the following command when installing packages to avoid overwriting any configuration previously written by Homestead:
sudo apt-get -y \
-o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confdef" \
-o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confold" \
install your-package
You can update Homestead in a few 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 run the following commands at the location you originally cloned the repository:
git fetch
git checkout 2.0.0
These commands pull the latest Homestead code from the GitHub repository, fetches the latest tags, and then checks out the latest tagged release. You can find the latest stable release version on the GitHub releases page.
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: virtualbox
natdnshostresolver: off
Virtualbox 6 seems to have a known syncing issue on some host machines, to fix this you should add type: smb
to any shared folders, this will use Samba instead of vboxsf mounting. Until Virtualbox fixes this issue we will have to use SMB. If using this solution you will also need to use the Symbolic Links settings below.
Note: MacOS users that have never used folder type smb may need to do the following: Open System Preferences -> Sharing -> Click Enable File Sharing -> Click "Share files and folders using SMB". From there you need to add your account / password to the "Windows File Sharing". This should enable your MacOS account to be used.
This is not at all a solution I'm happy with, but it's the only one I can currently offer.
Virtualbox does not allow symlinks on shared folders for security reasons. To enable symlinks the following setting needs to be added to the Homestead.yaml
configuration file:
shared_folder_symlink: true
Additionally, on windows vagrant up needs to be executed in a shell with admin rights. No workarounds necessary.