Why is Laravel Homestead the most popular Vagrant box for PHP?
PHP is one of the most popular programming languages in web development. It is quite easy to learn and use and also provides a wide range of powerful tools to create high-level websites and applications. Until recently most programmers used pure PHP code, but now most of them use various PHP frameworks.
Laravel is one of the most popular frameworks for web development. You will be able to use it to create any products. But to test them you will require to run the physical or, what is better, virtual server. Laravel Homestead is really a great solution for Laravel Web Application Development as it provides a virtual server to test the product you are developing.
In the article will see why Laravel Homestead is the most popular Vagrant box for PHP and what are its benefits.
What is Laravel Homestead?
Homestead is the official preinstalled Vagrant-box virtual machine (VirtualBox), which is a virtual computer (having its own memory, processor, hard disk, etc.) with the installed Ubuntu Server operating system (in theory any OS could be installed). Access to this Ubuntu Server is via the SSH console.
In order not to hold a huge image of a virtual machine (it can take gigabytes of memory), the developers created the Vagrant tool, which itself can download the image of the OS, install the necessary software (web server, database, etc.) in it and run the virtual machine that is already set up ready for work (development).
Homestead is a set of configs and scripts for Vagrant. Homestead includes all the necessary information about the version you use, settings you make, and Vagrant performs it all on a virtual system. Vagrant can work not only with VirtualBox but also with other virtualization systems.
Why should you use it?
This is necessary in order to simplify the creation of a working environment for your PHP project. If you write on PHP, then you already know that to make everything work, you need to install a web server, a database, PHP itself, and so on.
The problem is that there are a huge number of web servers, databases, a huge number of versions, configuration options and so on. So, before you perform the main installation step (composer install) or just run an installer of some CMS, you need to carefully configure the computer (server) which will be used to perform the code.
And now think about conflicts when for one script you need one version of PHP, web server, DB, and another script refuses to work and requires other versions. Of course, you can try to use several versions of the same PHP, nginx, MySQL in one server, but then sooner or later this zoo will get out of control.
Why is Laravel Homestead so popular?
It is very easy to explain. The main reason of Laravel Homestead popularity is because with it PHP web development is much easier. It will take several clicks and several minutes to install all the necessary components to develop the web project. More and more developer spray for this technology instead of other competitors.
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