Joe Ferguson has a new post to his site sharing a bit about how he uses Homestead (the Laravel project's virtual machine offering) in his every day development.

I feel like I’ve been talking about homestead a lot lately. I feel like Vagrant is such an important part of a developer’s workflow. If you are still using MAMP, WAMP, or installing Virtual Machines manually you are wasting so much of your own time (and your clients money) by not using prebuilt development environments. [...] I prefer to have my open source projects contain a Vagrant environment so that any potential contributor can easily clone my repository and run “vagrant up”. [...] The recent changes to Homestead have brought the option to use Homestead exactly as I do, without having to use my own packages or copy and paste files.

He walks you through the simple process of getting a project set up with this Homestead-per-project configuration:

• Starting a new Project
• Adding Homestead as a dependency
• Make the Homestead configuration for this project

Now when a "vagrant up" is run from the project, Vagrant understands to create a Homestead virtual machine instance, import the base box and configure it to be a locally hosted web server for your application. He also includes instructions for using it with non-Laravel applications and how to share the environment.