13 Steps to Get eZ Publish 5.x to Work on Homestead

This article was initially going to be a quick tip on how to install eZ Publish on Homestead in just a few steps. However, after I saw how much effort it took to get it up and working from scratch on a Vagrant box hosted on Windows, I decided to make it into a full article. I suffered, so you don’t have to :)

I’m hoping the eZ team will address the issues I state below, and as they do (if they do) I will alter this post accordingly. Granted, my environment is very specific: Vagrant on Windows. However, this shouldn’t matter. Every CMS, app, and framework I’ve tried to boot up in the same way was runnable in a matter of minutes. There is no reason in today’s modern web world for this not to work the same way on everything.

Vagrant-friendly apps

Let’s define the purpose of Vagrant. The purpose of Vagrant is team unity, and production / development parity regardless of host operating system. In other words, the purpose of Vagrant is twofold:

1. Being able to provide each team member with the identical development environment to avoid “it works on my machine” excuses


2. Being able to replicate the production environment as closely as possible without disrupting either the host machine, or the environments dedicated to other clients on the same machine

Therefore, we use Vagrant to have identical copies of VMs dedicated to a single project, which can be easily destroyed and rebuilt without repercussions for easier, faster and more scalable development, experimentation and deployment.

Through experimentation with the installation procedures below, I’ve found that eZ Publish does not make this easy. In 2014, most professional developers with multiple clients and/or projects use Vagrant even while soloing - having dedicated, separate, destructible and rebuildable environments for each project is priceless when considering the plethora of hosting options, tools, and versions of those tools at our disposal.

I’m disappointed to not see more apps adopt a Vagrant-first approach these days. Just like we need to think mobile first when developing front ends, we should think VM-first when developing back end libraries, frameworks and apps - otherwise the whole Docker / Vagrant compartmentalization story the world is focusing on is moot, and the apps that fail to adapt will be left behind as the world moves to Heroku, GAE, Amazon and others.

Let’s start the installation procedure now.

Step 1: Homestead Improved

Have a Laravel Homestead Improved box prepared and working. If you did vagrant up to see if it works, do vagrant destroy so we can configure it.

Continue reading %13 Steps to Get eZ Publish 5.x to Work on Homestead%

more