Laravel 5 alternative installation using Homestead

• Tested on Windows 8.1 (x64) / medium / about an hour or more

Homestead is the name of a VM package that Laravel dev team has put together for convenience. It is a complete system with all of the basic components preinstalled so a developer doesn't have to spend so much time configuring components like the operating system, database, cache, HHVM, and other things. This particular VM is built on Ubuntu 14.04 and includes the following:

• PHP 5.6
• HHVM
  • HipHop Virtual Machine, developed by Facebook, converts PHP code to HHBC (HipHop bytecode) which is converted directly into a native code. This is much faster than the conventional method which involves one more step of conversion.
• Nginx
  • Compared to a default installation of Apache, Nginx is reckoned to be a more efficient web server.
• MySQL, Postgres
• Node (with Bower, Grunt, and Gulp)
  • Bower is a client-side package management system. This is typically used to manage JavaScript packages.
  • Grunt is a JS-based task runner. It's analogous to DOS batch file processor. Use it for repetitive tasks.
  • Gulp is another client-side task processor.
• Redis
  • A fast key/value store server.
• Memcached
  • A memory caching system.
• Beanstalkd
  • A work queue system.

Install Git

You should do this first if you're using Windows and you still haven't installed Git. Head over to http://git-scm.com/downloads for the installation file.

Install VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a virtualization software package. You can download the latest version from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. You can also download the extension pack, and you can install it by double-clicking on it after you've completed the installation of VirtualBox.

Install Vagrant

Vagrant is what enables easy creation and configuration of VM specifically for development environments.