On his site Joe Ferguson (maintainer of the Laravel Homestead project) has posted the first part of a "missing manual" series for Homestead. In this first part he covers the use of site parameters.

In the early days of Homestead there used to be a “params” option at the top level of your Homestead.yaml file. These parameters would be copied into the environment for the virtual machine just like you would set environment variables on your production systems. Laravel ultimately moved to using “.env” files and this feature was removed from Homestead.

Some users pushed back and still wanted to be able to easily push parameters to the individual site’s configuration file (virtual host file) so a new feature was implemented where you could add a “params” key to your Homestead.yaml site definition and they would be copied into the virtual host configuration file.

Joe then shows how to add the params section back into the Homestead.yaml file and get the settings loaded into the Homestead instance (involves destroying the Vagrant box and restoring it).