Explain the concepts of Homestead, vagrant and VitrualBox virtual machines

Introduction to Homestead, vagrant and virtual machines

1. What is homestead?

Answer: Laravel provides developers with a complete set of heavyweight local development environment - Laravel Homestead.

Homestead is an official pre-packaged Vagrant box that provides you with a perfect development environment without the need to install PHP, web servers and other server software on your local machine. No need to worry about messing up your operating system! Vagrant boxes are disposable. If something goes wrong, you can destroy and create Box in minutes!

Homestead can run on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system, it includes Nginx web server, PHP 7.4, PHP 7.3, PHP 7.2, PHP 7.1, PHP 7.0, PHP 5.6, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, Node, and what you need to develop Laravel applications.

2. What is vagrant?

Answer: Vagrant is a tool for creating and deploying virtualized development environments. It relies on the VirtualBox virtual machine and is dedicated to helping developers quickly build a virtual system with a unified environment.

Vagrant can encapsulate a complete set of virtual environments in a box, so that as long as everyone uses this box, everyone's development environment will be unified! Homestead is a Vagrant box that is officially pre-installed by Laravel and suitable for Laravel development.

3. What is a virtual machine?

Answer: VitrualBox is a very powerful free virtual machine software. Users can install and run Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and other operating systems on VitrualBox. Similar software also includes VMware, etc. . It means installing another system in your native system, but it can be deleted at any time without affecting the native system.

4. Homestead encapsulates so many things needed for development, how can I choose or switch to the one I want to use?

Answer: Take the PHP version as an example. Homestead includes versions 7.4, 7.3, 7.2, 7.1, 5.6, etc. You can specify the PHP version in the sites in the yaml file, but in the virtual machine Check that php is still the highest version. If you want to switch the php version of the system, homestead comes with the version management tool update-alternatives. This command is followed by --config php to select and switch php.

Related recommendations:

1.《The most comprehensive tutorial on setting up the Win10 Homestead environment [Pictures and Text]》

2.《Detailed explanation of the steps to install and run the laravel project on Homestead [Pictures and Text]》

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