Laravel users are no doubt familiar with the Homestead VM project that makes it quick and easy to get new sites up and running. In this new post to his site, project maintainer Joe Ferguson covers some changes made to run something besides a PHP framework: a Crystal project.

A few days ago a random internet stranger (Rid) showed up in the Larachat Slack #homestead-dev room. This is about the best real time chat support for Homestead. Rid proceeds to ask about building something like Homestead for the framework he was working on called Lucky for the [Crystal programming language](https://crystal-lang.org/). After we chatted about Vagrant and Docker I mentioned that it wouldn’t be too difficult to get supported in Homestead. Rid shared some helpful URLs and I was off to the races.

Joe mentions that the next Homestead box will come configured to support this out of the box but also provides instructions if you'd like to set it up before that. The Cyrstal language is inspired by Ruby and is designed to be as "fast as C".

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).

In a post to his site Joe Ferguson, the maintainer on the Laravel Homestead project, has announced a change in the 7.1.0 version: compatibility with Zend's Z-Ray debugging tool.

Since the release of Homestead version 7.1.0 and base box version 5.1.0 Homestead now supports the Zend Z-Ray plugin for PHP 7.2. You can start leveraging the power of Z-Ray in your application with a small changes to your Homestead project.

He includes the instructions to help you upgrade your current installation to this latest versions and the configuration changes required. He also walks through the commands you'll need to use and the resulting output so you can be sure you're on the right track. The end result integrates Z-Ray directly into the site without any additional work.

On the Laravel News site there's a quick post highlighting a tool that can be use to help automate adding sites to your local Homestead environment - Homeboy.

Homeboy is a new package for Laravel Homestead that allows you to add a new local development site quickly. Once you run the command line tool, it will update your host file to point your dev domain, update your Homestead.yaml file to include mapping to for the new project and create a database mapping, and finally, it’ll re-provision Vagrant.

The post also includes a screencast the project has shared showing the tool in use (though the choice of soundtrack is questionable). It basically works as a shortcut to adding the changes to the files yourself, making it simpler to spin up new sites and environments quickly.

In a new post to his site Joe Ferguson shows you how to use the Homestead VM to run a CakePHP instance for local testing and development needs.

Interested in checking out CakePHP? You can easily spin up a new CakePHP project and add Homestead just as easy as any other modern PHP project.

He then walks you through the setup process:

• Creating a new project
• Starting up Homestead
• Changing the webroot to match CakePHP's needs
• Bringing up the VM
• Configuring the database

Each step is accompanied by screenshots and/or console output to help you ensure you're on the right track.

On the Laravel News site there's a new post covering a new inclusion into the Homestead VM: Mailhog:

A new Homestead base box has been released: Version 1.1.0. This release includes a new local mail handing system named Mailhog. The grunt-cli npm package is now installed globally, OPcache is now always invalidated, and finally we added some package-cleanup to the build process to lower the download size of the final compressed base box.

Long time Homestead users may remember that it previously supported the Ruby application, MailCatcher. By moving from MailCatcher to Mailhog the installation and configuration is easier than ever before.

They talk briefly about the steps needed to upgrade to Mailhog from MailCatcher and how to update your Homestead environment to take advantage of this latest change.

On the Zend Framework blog there's a new tutorial posted showing you how you can get Laravel Homestead and Zend Framework playing nicely together. Fortunately it's relatively easy to get set up with these two technologies, it "just works".

Laravel Homestead is an interesting project by the Laravel community that provides a Vagrant box for PHP developers. It includes a full set of services for PHP developers, such as the Nginx web server, PHP 7.1, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, Node, and more.

One the most interesting features of this project is the ability to enable it per project. This means you can run a vagrant box for your specific PHP project. In this post, we'll examine using it for Zend Framework MVC, Expressive, and Apigility projects. In each case, installation and usage is exactly the same.

They walk you through the download of the Homestead Vagrant box and the vagrant-hostsupdater package to help with renaming the application's local hostname. An example Homestead configuration is included as well as information on how to test and ensure your setup is working as expected.

On the Laravel News site they've posted a tutorial by Joe Ferguson showing you how to [use older versions of Homestead](https://laravel-news.com/using-older-versions-of-homestead, the box not the app, in your development environment if there's a need.

There are two parts to Homestead: the Vagrant box and the Homestead source code (Homestead app). The Homestead Vagrant box is a snapshot of a preconfigured virtual machine ready to use. [...] We use the Laravel Settler repo to build the Homestead boxes. You have to ensure the version of the Homestead Vagrant box is compatible with the version of the Homestead app you are using.

Why would you want to use a previous version? [...] While Homestead development moves forward pretty quickly, you may not be ready to move your clients from PHP 5.5. While you should have already moved your apps to PHP 7.0 for the performance gains, I understand that because Laravel 5.1 supports 5.5, developers may want to continue using that version.

He then walks you through an example, showing how to use PHP 5.5 with Homestead and what version to put for the best support. It requires a little bit of manual fiddling around but not too much. Then it's just a simple "vagrant up" to get it running. He also includes instructions on using PHP 7.0, checking out a different version of the Homestead repository and bringing up the box similar to above.