6 Reasons to Move to Laravel Homestead

Laravel Homestead is, in a nutshell:

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.

In other words, it automatically does what we’ve done before manually through Vagrant and PuPHPet in articles like these.

So what makes it different from your run-of-the-mill Vaprobash/Vagrant/PuPHPet setup? Let’s see.

1. It Works

Unlike the other popular solutions out there for simplifying Vagrantfile setups, Homestead seldom fails to boot, and if it does, it’s fixed within minutes. If you’ve dealt with GUI Vagrant solutions, you’ve likely noticed how rare it is to get it all up and running after the very first vagrant up. It’s always something like an outdated or over-updated Puppet, out of date Ubuntu repos, or some other cryptic error that requires vigorous “foruming” to deconstruct. Homestead simply… works.

Homestead installs on Ubuntu 14.04. with PHP 5.5, so as new as it gets without diving into beta/RC territory, Nginx (because we’ve all given up on Apache by now, right?), MySQL and Postgres so you’re instantly ready for Heroku as well (their default is Heroku Postgres), Node (for all your static resource compilation needs, background tasks, and other less business critical things, Redis, Memcached and Beanstalkd for all your caching and queueing needs, Laravel Envoy for all your remote server task needs and Fabric + Hipchat Extension so you can do application deployment through Hipchat (also known as chatops).

2. It’s Otwell Approved

Homestead being official, as in, made by Taylor Otwell, the father of Laravel, means it’s automatically assumed to hold to certain standards. While the Laravel community isn’t without its drama (who cares what a class is called? If a revolutionary new framework calls a model a potato, a facade, or a rocketship, it’s perfectly fine as long as the potato/facade/rocketship works), it’s the exclusivity of Taylor’s involvement with it that gives it a note of simplicity and quality that’s much needed in today’s PHP world. We’ve seen far too many open source projects ruined by team egos, zealous contributors, or incompetent jacks-of-all-trades and it’s my personal opinion that Taylor’s almost exclusive involvement in Laravel’s betterment is what makes it shine above the rest and truly allows it to compete with Phalcon in quality.

Homestead is his own project, termed the “official local development environment”, and he’ll do everything he can to keep it high quality and make sure it always works. Anything less, and it’s a smudge on his reputation. In PHP these days, there’s no better guarantee of a project’s long term reliability, than it being (mostly) owned by a person who cares that much about quality.

3. It’s Fast to Set Up

Setting Homestead up is a piece of cake. Following the instructions on the documentation page, all you need to do is add the homestead box to your Vagrant (if you don’t have it yet) and clone the repo.

Continue reading %6 Reasons to Move to Laravel Homestead%

more