Homestead per-project crib sheet

I wanted a drop-dead simple way to try and replicate a problem someone was having on the Slim forums. I couldn’t reproduce with php -S which is my go-to for this sort of thing, so I thought I’d try Homestead.

I had recently listend to a Voices of the Elephpant episode with Taylor Otwell & Joe Ferguson where Joe mentioned that Homestead worked on a per-project basis too. I didn’t know this, so tried it out. The docs are fine, but there’s a lot there that covers the global installation option when I just want to get up and running on a per-project basis.This is my crib sheet:

1. Create project

$ composer create-project slim/slim-skeleton skelly
$ cd skelly

We just need a project that uses Composer. You probably have one already. If not, Slim Framework is a good choice!

2. Add Homestead to the project

$ composer require laravel/homestead --dev
$ php vendor/bin/homestead make

The make command creates VagrantFile and a Homestead.yaml for configuration.

3. Deal with IP address and hostname

By default, the Homestead vagrant box is set up on 192.168.10.10 with the hostname homestead.app. You can change this in Homestead.yaml.

Add the IP address to /etc/hosts. This only needs to be done once if you don’t change the defaults.

$ echo "192.168.10.10 homestead.app" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

All done

We’re all done, so we can use vagrant up to run our new website Go to homestead.app in a browser to see it. To shut down, use vagrant halt or vagrant destroy.