Configuring Homestead for Multiple Laravel Projects

This is part 2 of the tutorial series about using Homestead for Laravel development on your computer. The first part explained steps to install Homestead for a Laravel project. In this part 2, you can learn about using Homestead for more than one Laravel installation in a single box.

If you do not have already a second Laravel project, you can create one using one using the below composer commands (unless, of course, you already know how to do it – otherwise simply skip to the next paragraph.) :

If you do not already have a Laravel project, you can create one executing:

laravel new yourprojectname2

or

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel yourprojectname2

Then

cd yourprojectname2

Once you arrive in your second project’s directory in the command line, run:

vagrant init laravel/homestead

This command will add the necessary VagrantFile in this new project.

If you previously followed instructions as described in part 1 of this tutorial series to install Homestead directly in your first project’s directory, open the directory of your first original project file and open its Homestead.yaml file in your code editor. Else if you had installed Homestead by cloning it from GitHub and had used bash init.sh to initialize it, the Homestead.yaml file is most probably under your user home directory – i.e. ~/.homestead/Homestead.yaml

Once you have located the .yaml file, and opened in a code editor, edit the folders property of ~/.homestead/Homestead.yaml to share your code of both projects with VM:

folders:
    - map: ~/yourproject1
      to: /path/to/yourproject1
    - map: ~/yourproject2
      to: /path/to/yourproject2

Next, edit the sites property of Homestead.yaml to make Nginx enable the domain of both site:

sites:
    - map: yourproject1.test
      to: /home/vagrant/yourproject1/public
    - map: yourproject2.test
      to: /home/vagrant/yourproject2/public

Alternatively you can set your projects as subdomains of homestead.test

sites:
    - map: yourproject1.homestead.test
      to: /home/vagrant/yourproject1/public
    - map: yourproject2.homestead.test
      to: /home/vagrant/yourproject2/public

Also remember to edit your hosts file to forward these domain fo localhost

192.168.10.10   yourproject1.test
192.168.10.10   yourproject2.test

or (depending on which method you set them in Homestead.yaml) :


192.168.10.10 yourproject1.homestead.test
192.168.10.10 yourproject2.homestead.test

• In Terminal cd into your first original original project directory.
• Run command vagrant reload --provision. This will reload the vagrant machine so that the changes which we made in .yaml file come in effect. You database of original project will remain intact.
• Run vagrant ssh
• Run ls and make sure you can see the folder of your new project. If its there you have configured your new site correctly.
• Hit the url of new site with addition of http:// and your are DONE.

This concludes the tutorial on how to set up Homestead on a per prejoect basis, so that you can use multiple Laravel projects in it.