You will need a terminal application, access to the Git command, and decent Internet. As for the terminal on Mac, I suggest iTerm, available at https://www.iterm2.com/; it really is a nice tool for something you are going to use quite often. For Windows, git for Windows https://git-for-windows.github.io/ got me going quickly both for git and a Bash such as terminal. Linux has a nice terminal to begin with, and installing git is easy. As far as Vagrant and VirtualBox are concerned, I will link you to the related sites since they do a good job at explaining how to install each of them on your system.

The following are the steps to set up Homestead:

When done, you will have the Homestead.yml configuration information in the ~/.homestead folder to modify as needed. On Mac, this would be /Users/alfrednutile/.homestead/Homestead.yml.

Also, you should have made a new folder called ~/Code to be the base folder for all your projects. For example, my folder looks like this:

You can have multiple applications within your code folder. In this example, app1 is the root folder for the app1 application, and app2 is the root folder for the app2 code. Keep in mind that the Vagrant box will later on mount this Code folder into the /home/vagrant/Code folder inside the Vagrant client.

You can, of course, manually set up your own machine for Nginx, PHP, MySQL, and all the rest, but there are a lot of reasons why the preceding one is best. On a team or alone, having your environment contained like this makes upgrading your machine, going from desktop to laptop, pushing code to production, having up-to-date libraries for new apps and older libraries for legacy apps, and more so much easier.

As with the preceding sections, you will need to have a terminal and decent internet. I will cover this using a Mac, but Windows and Linux have their systems to install the software. By default, you can install Xcode on a Mac and get pretty far with PHP, but it tends to be an older version of PHP. Here, we will use Homebrew to install PHP 5.6. We will also use Homebrew later on in this book as well.

That was a lot of steps! Let's cover what we did and why. We began by installing Homebrew to make installing packages easier. We will periodically need to install packages such as Wget, Webdriver, and more as we progress through this book. Using the brew command supplied by Homebrew makes installing these packages a snap.

Then, we used Brew to make sure we have a current version of PHP on our Mac. But considering we already have Homestead, why do this? There is some work you do outside of Homestead, for example, getting and installing Laravel using composer, running envoy, and more. And some of these you can run in Homestead, but you will see some speed difference outside of it. So, you still need it on your machine, but in this case, we are not so worried about it being the wrong version for one of our many applications.

The mcrypt part of the installation took care of the extension that we need to run common commands such as php artisan key:generate and other commands in Laravel.

We finalized the PHP setup with Bash shortcuts, so when we open the terminal, we are ready to use PHP and not the version that comes with Xcode on Mac.

We then use PHP to download and install composer, the biggest advancement in PHP since I started 15 years ago in my opinion, and you will see more of composer shortly.

Finally, we are ready to download Laravel!

You could, of course, use Brew to install MySQL and more. But for now, we are going to leave all of this inside the Homestead box that we set up earlier.

We have Homestead installed. My home folder called ~/Code is where we will be working.

The composer command that we ran gets Laravel from its database of applications and libraries at https://packagist.org/ then download it. We began by installing Homebrew to make installing packages easier. We will periodically need to install packages such as Wget, Webdriver, and more as we progress through this book. Using the brew command supplied by Homebrew makes installing these packages a snap.

I also used some shortcuts. One shortcut was subl, which was what you get when you install http://www.sublimetext.com/. But you can use whatever editor you want.

Using some of the preceding tips will make a shortcut called hedit adding to my ~/.bash_profile:

alias homesteadedit='cd ~/.homestead && subl Homestead.yml'

So, we are editing the main file that Laravel uses for all its Homestead settings. You will be here a lot, so shortcuts really pay off.

The same is applicable with the hostedit command that I used:

alias hostedit='sudo subl /etc/hosts'

Here, we are adding to our .bash_profile a quick way to edit the file and add the needed domain recipes.dev and save and exit. Now, when you visit https://recipes.dev, your operating system will know that it is really for Homestead.

When you installed Laravel, it copied the .env file into place. So, just open your editor of choice and open the application directory.

First of all, this is a hidden file. The . in front of it makes it hard to see in File Managers and even the command line. When at the command line, ls -a * is how to show this hidden file. Most code editors or IDEs will show you these.

Also note that Laravel comes with a .gitignore file that includes this file:

We will have to consider the addition or changes of any settings in env, as we push this application to Production for everyone to see when we are done. I will cover this more in Chapter 10, Deploying Your App.

So, what did we change in this file? Most of what you see was already there; we just set two things:

This is it, really! If you look back, this is what we set in the Homestead.yml file. You can see what we called the database and domain name. So now we need to tell our application what database table to use and which Homestead is made for us. Yeah, for Homestead!

The following are the steps to connect sequel pro to local and remote databases:

In the past, I have used phpMyAdmin, and it was better than just the command line. But Sequel Pro really was a game changer. For one, I did not have to install phpMyAdmin on my servers and risk issues related to security. Second, it is a good interface and makes it really easy to check out data, tables, do queries, and so on when needed.

So, what you saw previously was simply a setup for Homestead using the Standard tab and Port 33060, which is what Homestead forwards its MySQL port to.

When we deploy our first server, it will have SSH port 22 open, but never will I have MySQL open only on 127.0.0.1.

So, to connect to this we select the SSH tab, and enter the information for the database on the server, since we will be on the server after the SSH step. Then, we enter the information for SSH; in this case, I had to go into my home folder to use my SSH public key. If you did not set up a key on your server, then most likely, you are using a password, so enter that instead.

It is really this simple. Now, you have this great UI to look into your database once in a while; though after using Laravel with php artisan migrate and eloquent, I am not in the database often.

Once again, Homestead is making our work easier; NPM is already installed! So, we can use this to not only install Gulp but also other JavaScript libraries that we need. How to do this? If you look into the Laravel application that we downloaded, you will now see the =package.json file:

This is the file that NPM uses, just as PHP uses composer.json, to know what to install. Here, it is getting Elixir, Gulp, and Sass for us. Elixir is new in Laravel 5.x and is a wrapper around Gulp, which is a well-known JavaScript build system.

Notice too that if you type which gulp, it is installed globally, thanks to Homestead again!

Elixir will come in later, but for now, note gulpfile.js that is right above the package.json file; this is where we will set up our asset workflow later on.