Laravel Homestead is a prepackaged Vagrant box that provides a development environment for Laravel. It’s packed with PHP, MySQL, Nginx and everything else you need to run a local web server. Homestead is great for developing in Laravel, but can it also work for WordPress? Absolutely!
I’ve been using Homestead for my local WordPress and Laravel development for the past year. While there are many options for developing WordPress sites in a local environment, you can’t go wrong with Homestead. The setup is both powerful and easy to use. Best of all, Laravel Homestead is free.
I’ll show you how to set up your own local WordPress development environment on Laravel Homestead but, first, I recommend you watch my video tutorial on getting started with Laravel Homestead:
Let’s Get Started
First, you’ll want to edit your Homestead.yaml file. If you’re using a Mac, you’ll find this file at ~/.homestead/Homestead.yaml. Once you’ve opened the file in your favorite editor, add the following lines:
– map: somewordpress.dev
to: /home/vagrant/Code/somewordpress.dev/public
databases:
– somesite_db
The yaml file is picky with spacing and tabs so be sure to match what’s already there. After you save the file, you’ll need to provision the server again:
cd ~/Homestead
vagrant reload –provision
This will reload your local development environment with the the new setup for the new local site. Once this is done, you’ll need to edit a local file to tell your browser where to point to. Our end goal is to type somewordpress.dev in the browser and have that route to the local installation of our web server.
You’ll need to edit the /etc/hosts file and add the following line:
192.168.10.10 somewordpress.dev
Next, we’ll install WordPress in Homestead. Make a directory inside your project folder area ~/Code/somewordpress.dev/public. This is where we’ll install WordPress.
Download a fresh copy of WordPress and save the contents inside the public folder. Our web server points to this directory, allowing us to access WordPress via our browser.
Now, we change the name of wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and add the following lines for our database:
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘somesite_db’);
/** MySQL database username */
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘homestead’);
/** MySQL database password */
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘secret’);
Don’t forget to get your unique auth keys at the URL provided in the config file and to replace the appropriate lines of your config with your auth keys.
We’ve now reached the moment of truth. Fire up your browser and visit somewordpress.dev. If you see the WordPress installation screen, you’ve successfully installed WordPress on Laravel Homestead.
It’s easy to set up Laravel Homestead for your local WordPress development projects. You can also use Laravel Homestead for pretty much any other LAMP stack project. Give it a try, and let me know what you think in the comments!
Isaac Castillo
Isaac is the founder of Echo Design Solutions, a San Antonio-based WordPress and WooCommerce development company.
