I'm really excited to be going back to Washington, DC for php[world]. I'll be doing Laravel Training Day. I'm really excited for this because We'll be covering Laravel 5.3!

To fully participate in the training exercises you'll want to follow the directions below. Please reach out to me if you have any issues. If you struggle with the Homestead set up you can skip that part as long as you can run PHP locally on your machine and have a way to run MySQL, Redis, and other services locally. The best advice is to follow the set up instructions below.

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 5.1.x
• VirtualBox 5.1.x Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack
• Vagrant 1.8.6
• PHP 5.6.x or higher (7 is fine!)

Laravel Homestead

Read and follow the installation instructions in this document -- http://laravel.com/docs/5.3/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 -- aliases
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 training day, if you have any problems or errors as you worked through this please feel free to leave me a comment below.