Installing Homestead on Windows

It seems that a fair few people have queried and had issues on getting Homestead installed on Windows nicely. This guide for installing Homestead on Windows will hopefully help things go smoothly.

• Install Composer. (There’s a windows installer half way down the page that also offers adding composer to your PATH for convenience).
• Install VirtualBox (v4.x, at time of writing, 5.x doesn’t work).
• Install Vagrant.
• Reboot your computer as per the on-screen info after installing Vagrant.
• Install Homestead globally via composer:

composer global require "laravel/homestead=~2.0"

• Add homestead to your path: Click the start button and search for environment and edit the system environment variables. Append the composer vendor path: C:\Users\{YOUR_USERNAME}\AppData\Roaming\Composer\vendor\bin
• Update your folder mapping. eg:

folders:
    map: C:\dev\web
    to: /home/vagrant/Code

• Create your SSH key. You can do this either via PuTTYGen or from a Git Bash command prompt with:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "Homestead"

• Start Homestead from any location via the cmd prompt:

homestead up

If all went well, you should see a bunch of text scroll up the cmd prompt window and ultimately fire up your Homestead instance.

You can test this by pinging your Homestead IP address (default 192.168.10.10):

ping 192.168.10.10