I am giving a four hour Laravel tutorial before the main PHP Detroit conference. To fully participate in the exercises you'll want to follow the directions below. Please reach out to me if you have any issues. Laravel Valet is a fine solution if you’d prefer not to have to install Virtualbox or Vagrant. I will not be able to fully support everyone’s configuration so to create the best experience for all attendees you should use the following as a set up guide if you are not familiar with setting up a web server and related services on your system.

Operating System Support:

If you want to follow along and run all of the examples you will need to bring a laptop running a current version of Linux or Mac OS or Windows.

Applications Installed:

• VirtualBox 5.2.x
• VirtualBox 5.2.x Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack
• Vagrant 2.1.x
• PHP 7.1 or higher

Laravel Homestead

Read and follow the installation instructions in this document -- http://laravel.com/docs/homestead

The most important thing to do before the conference is run this command:

vagrant box add laravel/homestead

Testing Homestead:

Create a new Laravel project and require homestead, make the homestead configuration and then vagrant up.

composer create-project -- prefer-dist laravel/laravel test-laravel
cd test-laravel
composer require -- dev laravel/homestead
./vendor/bin/homestead make
vagrant up

These commands should run without any errors.

When you're done, you can destroy the environment by:

vagrant destroy -f
cd ..
rm -rf test-laravel

Thanks for reading, I look forward to seeing you at the tutorial, if you have any problems or errors as you worked through this please feel free to leave me a comment below.