Multiple Laravel Homestead boxes side-by-side

As great as PHP 7 is, some of us just aren’t quite ready for such a major release bump. If that sounds like you and, like me, you’re a Laravel Homestead user, you’ll no doubt have a terribly out of date Vagrant box, stuck on PHP 5.6 which is your primary Virtual Machine (and maybe a PHP 7 box somewhere else for testing).

Back in the day, you would have used Composer to manage Homestead, however after checking the docs the reliance on Composer seems to have vanished and now cloning directly from GitHub is the recommended install.

If you’d like to get your house in order and have the freedom to flip between a PHP 5.6 and 7 Virtual Machine then check out the guide below.

Firstly, you want to back up anything off your current Virtual Machines as with this stuff there’s always the chance you’ll just need to delete the Virtual Machine and start again. So this would be things like databases you don’t have migrations/seeds for, or that contain data you don’t want to lose, and make a note of any other software you’ve installed — for instance benchmarking or profiling tools, Node etc. Then power the box off by either running:

homestead halt

Or if this doesn’t work, navigate to the folder where the vagrant box is stored and run:

vagrant halt

Then we want to remove Composer from the equation, so if you’re old school and installed Homestead through here, run the following:

composer global remove laravel/homestead

Now we’re going to navigate into your user’s home directory and install Homestead, twice. Following the docs, run:

cd ~
git clone git@github.com:laravel/homestead.git Homestead-7
cd Homestead-7
bash init.sh

The installer will then ask you a bunch of questions about overwriting your existing config. If you don’t overwrite these files, then chances are you won’t have to do a whole lot of set up so unless you want to start from square 1, don’t overwrite these files.

Once that’s done, it’s time to boot the server and ssh in:

vagrant up
vagrant ssh
php -v

This box should tell you it has PHP version 7. Cool. Let’s leave this box alone, power it off and now set up the other:

exit
vagrant halt

I find it handy at this point to open VirtualBox and check that the machine name is homestead-7. If it isn’t then something has gone wrong, so try again or ask someone for some help.

Now for the 2nd box:

cd ~
git clone -b 2.0 git@github.com:laravel/homestead.git Homestead
cd Homestead
bash init.sh

This time we’re cloning an legacy branch of the Homestead project (the one containing the set up for PHP 5.6) and setting that up too. Again, the installer will ask you if you want to overwrite anything so say no and you’ll have the same config on both machines. Cool!

And again, let’s boot it up and check it out:

vagrant up
vagrant ssh
php -v

This time you should see the PHP version as 5.6. Awesome. I would also switch back to VirtualBox and check that your homestead-7 machine is powered off and there’s now another machine called homestead which is running.

At this point, you have the two boxes, which you can switch between by cd-ing into the two directories and boot by doing vagrant up.

The last step to make this process a little easier is to add 2 aliases which will help, so in your .bashrc, .zshrc or wherever you keep your aliases, add the following:

alias homestead7=’function **homestead7() { (cd ~/Homestead-7 && vagrant \$\*); unset -f **homestead7; }; **homestead7'
alias homestead=’function **homestead() { (cd ~/Homestead && vagrant \$\*); unset -f **homestead; }; **homestead’

So now all your PHP 7 homestead commands begin with homestead7, and the standard commands begin with the original homestead.

It’s worth bearing in mind that you will still need to provision both of these boxes separately (unless you write an alias for that too).

Theoretically, there’s nothing to stop you being able to run these simultaneously by introducing a ~/.homestead-7 folder for your config, which has a different IP address for the box, but that’s something I haven’t tested yet.