Laravel Homestead has been making rounds over the internet for a while now, because its efficacy in the development process is fantastic. For web developers, Laravel is one of the most user-friendly and reliable PHP frameworks. Laravel Homestead is Laravel’s official pre-packaged vagrant box that offers an amazing development environment. Because you don’t need to install any server software on your local machine. You can develop amazing Laravel applications with Homestead as it includes Nginx web server, MySQL, Redis and Memcached.
Essentially, Laravel eases developmental procedures because it offers a lot of features that makes it quite efficient. In a nutshell, it gives a simplified and uniformed development environment that’s conducive for application development. With the help of Laravel Homestead, you can easily install a vagrant box and use it in the following ways:
1. Fast and Easy to Set Up
Setting up Laravel Homestead is an easy and a fast process. Just open the documentation page, follow the instructions, and you’ll be good to go. The instructions basically include adding a homestead box to your Vagrant and then clone the repo. Furthermore, it’s quite easy to add sites as you don’t even have to deal with individual vhost configurations in nginx files. All you need to do is to make some tweaks and adjust the configuration file accordingly.
2. Ports
Setting up a virtual machine and then installing software for database management can be quite a nuisance for a developer. Laravel Homestead jumps in here to provide you ease through provision of open ports by default. This eradicates the need for installation of software on VM from host. Managing databases is one of the biggest reasons why you need to use Laravel Homestead as it streamlines the process and helps you focus on what’s really important.
3. Blackfire Profiler
Blackfire Profiler is an important feature of Laravel Homestead. It’s main role is to run applications seamlessly. As the name suggests, this component of Laravel Homestead collects information about several aspects such as code, I/O of disk and RAM. Blackfire can also be seen as a callgrind-compatible profile. The tool is essentially used to identify performance issues and potential bottlenecks. Blackfire Profiler is already installed with the Laravel Homestead box. All you need to do is to set a Blackfire Profiler server ID, token and just mention it in the Homestead.yaml file.
4. Configuration of Cron Schedules
Scheduling Cron Jobs is quite a breeze with Laravel Homestead as you need to schedule a single ‘Schedule:run Artisan command.’ Once this command is run then all the scheduled jobs or even considered jobs will be defined in your app/Kernel class. It is quite easy to see how to run Cron Jobs with Laravel Homestead as running cron jobs on other environments is quite a hassle and takes up a lot of time.
5. Reliability
In most environments, vagrant file setups take up a lot of time and hassle. sometimes, vagrants fail to boot and things can get stuck as cryptic errors can occur. When this occurs, get ready to slam your head in a wall, as fixing these issues require in-depth foruming to deconstruct the encryption in order to run the setup that consumes a major portion of your time. Laravel Homestead on the other hand never fails to boot and even if it does, it can get fixed within no time. It simply makes your development process efficiently streamlined.
In a Nutshell
Laravel as a PHP framework has its advantages but its backbone lies in the extensive ease that Homestead provides. Laravel Homestead offers a splendid way to carry out functions that are otherwise simply hectic. Laravel offers a holistic approach towards application development and with features like Homestead, it further enhances its efficacy.
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