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Installing Laravel Homestead on OSX

From time to time I need to reinstall my Mac, and this guide helps setting op Laravel Homestead for local PHP development. But how did I setup those PATH settings again? I sometimes forget these simple steps. Thats why I setup this quick guide as my own memory but maybe it helps some other people aswell.

The following Software will be installed on your system.

Installing Composer
Setting global PATH for composer
Installing VirtualBox
Installing Vagrant
Installing Laravel Homestead
Installing Laravel Installer

Installing Composer

Run the following commands in your terminal.

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

You can now run composer globally in your terminal by running:

composer

Setting global PATH for composer

If you want to use composer applications globally you need to setup the correct PATH variable to the global vendor bin directory. From OSX Leopard and higher this is an easy process by running the following command in your terminal.

sudo -s 'echo "~/.composer/vendor/bin" > /etc/paths.d/40-composer'

After running this command, you need to reboot the system. Alternatively, you can close and reopen the Terminal app to see new $PATH changes.

Installing VirtualBox on OSX

To Install Virtualbox on your OSX machine simply go to the website of https://www.virtualbox.org and press the big button in the middle off the screen.

Installing Vagrant

To install Vagrant on your OSX machine simply go to the website of https://www.vagrantup.com and press the big blue button 'Download'.

Installing Laravel Homestead

composer global require "laravel/homestead=~2.0"

If you have setup the PATH correctly you now have access to the command 'homestead' within your terminal. Now its time to initialize homestead by running init in your terminal.

homestead init

This will create a homestead.yaml file for configuring homestead. To view and edit this configuration you can run.

homestead edit

Installing Laravel Installer

For quick creation of new Laravel projects using the Laravel Installer is a real time saver. You can install it with this command.

composer global require "laravel/installer=~1.1"

Usage of Laravel Homestead with the Laravel Installer

Laravel homestead defaults maps to a Code folder of the logged in user. So make sure that folder exists. You can run this command in your terminal to create it.

mkdir ~/Code

You go to the folder ~/Code

cd ~/Code

Lets create a new Laravel project by running the command

laravel new homestead

This will download and install a fresh laravel installation in the folder called homestead. The default configuration of Laravel homestead includes a site and path as homestead.app.

Lets add that site in our local hosts file to access it.

sudo nano /etc/hosts

Add this line to it:

192.168.10.10  homestead.app

Make sure you have setup a SSH key pair for connecting to the homestead server. If you already setup a SSH key pair you may skip this step.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your@email.com"

Now its time to check the working of the stack. By starting up the homestead machine.

homestead up

Now open up your favourite web browser and go to the page:

http://homestead.app

Et Voilà, a Running Laravel running website on your started Virtual Machine. Check the following links for their original and more complete guides.

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