How To Install and Configure Homestead For Laravel 5 and OSX?

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, or Linux system, and includes the Nginx web server, PHP 7.1, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, Node, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications.

STEP 1: DOWNLOADING FILES
The first step is getting the required software for Homestead. Before launching your Homestead environment, you must install VirtualBox, (VMWare, or Parallels) as well as Vagrant. I used VirtualBox and as it is free, I am pretty sure most of you guys will be using it too.

STEP 2: INSTALLING VAGRANT HOMESTEAD BOX
Once VirtualBox / VMware 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

STEP 3: INSTALLING LARAVEL HOMESTEAD
You may install Homestead by simply cloning the repository. 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:
 cd ~
 git clone https://github.com/laravel/homestead.git Homestead
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:
 cd Homestead
 bash init.sh

STEP 4: CONFIGURING THE LARAVEL HOMESTEAD
Rest of the configuration is easy. The homstead.yaml is already configured for a default app.

Setting Your Provider
The provider key in your Homestead.yaml file indicates which Vagrant provider should be used: virtualbox, vmware_fusion, vmware_workstation, or parallels. You may set this to the provider you prefer. I recommend virtualbox.
  provider: virtualbox
Configuring Shared Folders/ Folder Mapping
Folder mapping means that your Guest OS and Host OS will share a common folder where you can keep your laravel files. Laravel Homestead configures a default folder in the home directory of the Host OS.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
      to: /home/vagrant/Code
Sites
Sites is a configuration array for Nginx. By default configuration, you will have a “homestead.app” pseudo-domain which will point to a folder inside the “shared folder”. Any php code inside that folder will get executed when you will go to homestead.app inside your browser. You should set it to the “public” folder of your laravel app. 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.app
      to: /home/vagrant/Code/Laravel/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.
 vagrant reload --provision
Note: It’s this particular step that tends to confuse most Homestead beginners, so pay close attention to the following description. The folders object’s map attribute identifies the location in which your Laravel project will be located. The default value is ~/Code, meaning Homestead expects your project to reside in a directory named Code found in your home directory. You’re free to change this to any location you please. The folders object’s to attribute identifies the location on the virtual machine that will mirror the contents of the directory defined by the map key, thereby making the contents of your local directory available to the virtual machine.
The sites object’s map attribute defines the domain name used to access the Laravel application via the browser. Finally, the sites object’s to attribute defines the Laravel project’s root web directory, which is /public by default.


If this explanation is clear as mud, let’s clarify with an example. Begin by setting the folders object’s map attribute to any path you please, likely somewhere within the directory where you tend to manage your various software projects. For instance, mine homestead.yaml is currently set like this:
ip: "192.168.10.10"
memory: 2048
cpus: 1
provider: virtualbox

authorize: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

keys:
    - ~/.ssh/id_rsa

folders:
    - map: ~/development/projects
      to: /home/vagrant/projects

sites:
    - map: laravel.dev
      to: /home/vagrant/projects/laravel/public

    - map: homestead.app
      to: /home/vagrant/projects/tutorials/laravel-basics/public  

databases:
    - homestead

Here is the screen dump of my Folder Structure


STEP 5: CONFIGURING THE HOST FILE
You must add the "domains" for your Nginx 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 private/etc/hosts. Open the hosts file with administrative access
  sudo nano /private/etc/hosts
The lines you add to this file will look like the following. You can add it anywhere but for ease, add it at the bottom of the file as below.
192.168.10.10   laravel.dev
192.168.10.10   homestead.app
Make sure the IP address listed is the one set in your Homestead.yaml file.

After adding above lines to the file Press cltr + o, then Enter, then cltr+x
Here is the screenshot of my host file:

STEP 6: RISE AND SHINE HOMESTEAD
Open terminal and navigate to Homestead directory and run the following vagrant up command. Vagrant will boot the virtual machine and automatically configure your shared folders and Nginx sites.
  Anup:~ anup$ cd ~/Homestead
  Anup:Homestead anup$ vagrant up
You will have your Homestead running in no time. Now go to homestead.app in your browser and be ready to get an error. Most probably “No input File Found”. It is because we don’t have laravel app’s “public” folder yet. We will install laravel in the next step.

STEP 7: INSTALL COMPOSER AND LARAVEL
Laravel utilizes Composer to manage its dependencies. So, before using Laravel, make sure you have Composer installed on your machine.
Installing Composer Run this in your terminal to get the latest Composer version:
php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '544e09ee996cdf60ece3804abc52599c22b1f40f4323403c44d44fdfdd586475ca9813a858088ffbc1f233e9b180f061') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"
Make composer globally accessible
After running the installer, you can run this to move composer.phar to a directory that is in your path:
mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
Now just run composer in order to run Composer instead of php composer.phar
Via Laravel Installer
After the Composer is installed successfully, download the Laravel installer using Composer:
 composer global require "laravel/installer"
Make sure to place the $HOME/.composer/vendor/bin directory (or the equivalent directory for your OS) in your $PATH so the laravel executable can be located by your system. Open .bashrc file to add required $PATH as below:
  Anup:~ anup$ nano ~/.bashrc
Add the export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.config/composer/vendor/bin" as below:

Once installed, the laravel new command will create a fresh Laravel installation in the directory you specify. For instance, laravel new blog will create a directory named blog containing a fresh Laravel installation with all of Laravel's dependencies already installed.

To install Laravel, we need to go the directory we have specified on STEP 4 (i.e. sites section of homestead.yaml) as below
Anup:~ anup$ cd development/projects/tutorials/laravel-basics/
Anup:laravel-basics anup$ laravel new
It will install laravel in the laravel-basics folder. Don't forget to create .env file on root directory(i.e. remove .example extension from .env.example). Otherwise, you will get error.

My Laravel project looks like below:

STEP 8: SSH’ing INTO YOUR MACHINE
Go the the Homestead directory, run vagrant up and vagrant ssh.
 Anup:~ anup$ cd ~/Homestead
 Anup:Homestead anup$ vagrant up

After vagrant is up, then you can ssh into it as below.
 Anup:Homestead anup$ vagrant ssh
 vagrant@homestead:~$ 
Go the respective project as below and run composer install to complete the Laravel installation process.
vagrant@homestead:~$ cd projects/tutorials/laravel-basics/
vagrant@homestead:~/projects/tutorials/laravel-basics$ composer install
vagrant@homestead:~/projects/tutorials/laravel-basics$ php artisan key:generate
Your Homestead virtual machine is up and running! Open a browser and navigate to the URL http://homestead.app and you should see

You may encounter errors and problems while following the above steps but everyone do. Homestead is very easy to install and configure and after a few minutes of playing around the problems, you will be able to fix it. Let me know in the comments, if I am missing anything in the article or if you are stuck with laravel homestead.

Sources :
Laravel Installation
Install Laravel Homestead on Windows Extremely Easily
Installing and Configuring Homestead 2.0 for Laravel 5

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