What is the difference between the laravel homestead box and the homestead repo?

Question

From the official docs, "Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant box that provides you a wonderful development environment without requiring you to install PHP, HHVM, a web server, and any other server software on your local machine."

I installed vagrant, and downloaded the box, great. But then, later on, in the docs , I read I have to install "Homestead" by cloning the repo https://github.com/laravel/homestead/

I find that really confusing, because I thought Homestead was the virtual box I already downloaded. What is the difference between the laravel homestead box and the homestead repo? There are no docs specifically for the github repo.

Answer 1

The Homestead Repo , from github , stores your global preferences which are used when running homestead.

The Homestead Box is a virtual machine image that actually runs the operating system.

Update

The recommended local development environment for Laravel is Laravel Valet .

Valet is a Laravel development environment for Mac minimalists. No Vagrant, no /etc/hosts file. You can even share your sites publicly using local tunnels.

There is also a Linux version available here .