Laravel Homestead vs VirtualBox

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Laravel Homestead

278
343
+ 1
33
VirtualBox

30.9K
25.3K
+ 1
1.1K
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Laravel Homestead vs VirtualBox: What are the differences?

  1. **Purpose: Homestead is a pre-packaged Vagrant box specifically designed for Laravel developers, providing all the necessary tools and configurations out of the box, while VirtualBox is a general-purpose virtualization software that allows users to create and run virtual machines of various operating systems.
  2. **Resources: Homestead provides a lightweight and optimized environment for Laravel development, with minimal setup required, whereas VirtualBox offers more customization options and flexibility in terms of resource management, such as CPU, memory, and storage allocation.
  3. **Ease of Use: Homestead simplifies the development process by automating the setup of Laravel projects and dependencies, making it ideal for beginners or users looking for a hassle-free experience, whereas VirtualBox requires manual configuration and setup, which may require more technical expertise.
  4. **Networking: Homestead automatically sets up networking configurations for seamless communication between the host machine and the virtual environment, while VirtualBox allows users to configure network settings, such as port forwarding and bridged networking, for more advanced networking setups.
  5. **Updates and Maintenance: Homestead is regularly updated and maintained by the Laravel team, ensuring compatibility with the latest Laravel versions and features, while VirtualBox updates depend on Oracle's release schedule, and users may need to manually check for updates and patches.
  6. **Community Support: Homestead has a dedicated community of Laravel developers who actively contribute to its development and provide support through forums and online resources, whereas VirtualBox has a larger and more diverse user base, with support available through community forums, documentation, and online resources.

In Summary, Laravel Homestead is a purpose-built, easy-to-use environment optimized for Laravel development, while VirtualBox offers more customization options and flexibility for virtual machine management.

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Pros of Laravel Homestead
Pros of VirtualBox
  • 19
    Easy to setup
  • 13
    Native enviroment
  • 1
    Cool if you finally get it set up 4 Win10 by night Devs
  • 358
    Free
  • 231
    Easy
  • 169
    Default for vagrant
  • 110
    Fast
  • 73
    Starts quickly
  • 45
    Open-source
  • 42
    Running in background
  • 41
    Simple, yet comprehensive
  • 27
    Default for boot2docker
  • 22
    Extensive customization
  • 3
    Free to use
  • 2
    Mouse integration
  • 2
    Easy tool
  • 2
    Cross-platform

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What is Laravel Homestead?

Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant "box" that provides you a wonderful development environment without requiring you to install PHP, HHVM, a web server, and any other server software on your local machine. Homestead runs on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system, and includes the Nginx web server, PHP 5.6, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications.

What is VirtualBox?

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.

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What companies use Laravel Homestead?
What companies use VirtualBox?
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What tools integrate with Laravel Homestead?
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What are some alternatives to Laravel Homestead and VirtualBox?
Docker
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere
Laravel
It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.
XAMPP
It consists mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MariaDB database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages.
PuPHPet
It is a web application that allows you to easily and quickly generate custom Vagrant and Puppet controlled virtual machines.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
See all alternatives