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.

Update (Aug 06, 2020)

Both Valet and Homestead are great choices for configuring your Laravel development environment. Which one you choose will depend on your personal taste and your team's needs.