Using Vagrant to get a new Laravel project running

In my last post I looked at creating custom Vagrant base box that has a working Nginx, PHP and MySQL setup all ready to go, making it easy to get started on new PHP projects with minimal configuration. Let’s give that a try now by using our custom base box as the basis of a new Laravel project. We’ll only need to write (or indeed clone) a few lines of Vagrant config code to get started!

Create a new Laravel project

Assuming you’ve already installed the laravel binary file on your machine, make a new project:

laravel new laravel_test

Now inside your new laravel_test project you should see a load of files - a brand new project you just created. Move into that and then let’s clone some Vagrant config files into Laravel’s app/config directory. I’ve put these on GitHub so you can get them like this:

cd laravel_test
git clone https://github.com/paulherron/vagrant_laravel.git app/config/vagrant

There’s really not very much in what you just cloned – that’s the beauty of using a custom base box. As usual there’s a bootstrap.sh file, contained in which are the shell commands to run when first setting up the Vagrant box. Because most of the required software is installed already, all that’s needed is to:

• Install the php5-mcrypt extension, required by Laravel.
• Move a custom Nginx configuration file into place, which has a few tweaks specific to a Laravel setup: namely that the root directory of the website will be the public directory of the Laravel project.
• Restart Nginx etc. for good measure to ensure the above configuration changes have taken effect.

Vagrant expects to find a file called Vagrantfile in the root directory. This was included in the files we just cloned, but we need to symlink it into place:

ln -s app/config/vagrant/Vagrantfile .

Now we can fire up the virtual machine and see what happens:

vagrant up

With a bit of luck you can now navigate to 192.168.50.2 (or at default.l if you set up a local testing domain in your /etc/hosts file).

That’s about it! Do note though that if you want to use a database, you’ll need to enter the default database credentials into your Laravel project’s app/config/database.php:

'mysql' => array(
	'driver'    => 'mysql',
	'host'      => 'localhost',
	'database'  => 'default',
	'username'  => 'root',
	'password'  => '100rows',
	'charset'   => 'utf8',
	'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
	'prefix'    => '',
),