Alternatives to Laravel Homestead logo

Alternatives to Laravel Homestead

Docker, Laravel, XAMPP, PuPHPet, and HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Laravel Homestead.
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What is Laravel Homestead and what are its top alternatives?

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.
Laravel Homestead is a tool in the Virtual Machine category of a tech stack.
Laravel Homestead is an open source tool with 3.8K GitHub stars and 1.5K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Laravel Homestead's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to Laravel Homestead

  • Docker
    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
    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
    XAMPP

    It consists mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MariaDB database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages. ...

  • PuPHPet
    PuPHPet

    It is a web application that allows you to easily and quickly generate custom Vagrant and Puppet controlled virtual machines. ...

  • HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)
    HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)

    HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance while maintaining the flexibility that PHP developers are accustomed to. To date, HHVM (and its predecessor HPHPc before it) has realized over a 9x increase in web request throughput and over a 5x reduction in memory consumption for Facebook compared with the PHP 5.2 engine + APC. ...

  • Azure Virtual Machines
    Azure Virtual Machines

    You can create Linux and Windows virtual machines. It gives you the flexibility of virtualization for a wide range of computing solutions—development and testing, running applications, and extending your datacenter. It’s the freedom of open-source software configured the way you need it. ...

  • GraalVM
    GraalVM

    An ecosystem and shared runtime offering performance advantages not only to JVM-based languages such as Java, Scala, Groovy, and Kotlin, but also to programming languages as JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and R. Additionally, it enables the execution of native code on the JVM via LLVM front-end. ...

  • Multipass
    Multipass

    It's a system that orchestrates the creation, management and maintenance of virtual machines and associated Ubuntu images to simplify development. ...

Laravel Homestead alternatives & related posts

Docker logo

Docker

159.3K
123.4K
3.8K
Enterprise Container Platform for High-Velocity Innovation.
159.3K
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+ 1
3.8K
PROS OF DOCKER
  • 824
    Rapid integration and build up
  • 690
    Isolation
  • 520
    Open source
  • 505
    Testa­bil­i­ty and re­pro­ducibil­i­ty
  • 459
    Lightweight
  • 217
    Standardization
  • 184
    Scalable
  • 105
    Upgrading / down­grad­ing / ap­pli­ca­tion versions
  • 87
    Security
  • 84
    Private paas environments
  • 33
    Portability
  • 25
    Limit resource usage
  • 16
    Game changer
  • 15
    I love the way docker has changed virtualization
  • 13
    Fast
  • 11
    Concurrency
  • 7
    Docker's Compose tools
  • 5
    Easy setup
  • 5
    Fast and Portable
  • 4
    Because its fun
  • 3
    Makes shipping to production very simple
  • 2
    It's dope
  • 2
    Highly useful
  • 1
    HIgh Throughput
  • 1
    Very easy to setup integrate and build
  • 1
    Package the environment with the application
  • 1
    Does a nice job hogging memory
  • 1
    Open source and highly configurable
  • 1
    Simplicity, isolation, resource effective
  • 1
    MacOS support FAKE
  • 1
    Its cool
  • 1
    Docker hub for the FTW
  • 1
    Super
CONS OF DOCKER
  • 8
    New versions == broken features
  • 6
    Unreliable networking
  • 6
    Documentation not always in sync
  • 4
    Moves quickly
  • 3
    Not Secure

related Docker posts

Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 5.7M views

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

  • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
  • Respectively Git as revision control system
  • SourceTree as Git GUI
  • Visual Studio Code as IDE
  • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
  • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
  • SonarQube as quality gate
  • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
  • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
  • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
  • Heroku for deploying in test environments
  • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
  • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
  • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
  • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
  • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

  • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
  • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
  • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
  • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
  • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
  • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
See more
Tymoteusz Paul
Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 5.7M views

Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

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Laravel logo

Laravel

25.3K
20.9K
3.7K
A PHP Framework For Web Artisans
25.3K
20.9K
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PROS OF LARAVEL
  • 538
    Clean architecture
  • 383
    Growing community
  • 362
    Composer friendly
  • 333
    Open source
  • 313
    The only framework to consider for php
  • 215
    Mvc
  • 206
    Quickly develop
  • 164
    Dependency injection
  • 153
    Application architecture
  • 141
    Embraces good community packages
  • 69
    Write less, do more
  • 64
    Orm (eloquent)
  • 63
    Restful routing
  • 53
    Database migrations & seeds
  • 51
    Artisan scaffolding and migrations
  • 38
    Awesome
  • 37
    Great documentation
  • 28
    Awsome, Powerfull, Fast and Rapid
  • 26
    Build Apps faster, easier and better
  • 25
    Promotes elegant coding
  • 24
    Modern PHP
  • 24
    Eloquent ORM
  • 23
    JSON friendly
  • 22
    Easy to learn, scalability
  • 21
    Blade Template
  • 21
    Beautiful
  • 21
    Most easy for me
  • 20
    Test-Driven
  • 14
    Security
  • 14
    Based on SOLID
  • 12
    Cool
  • 12
    Easy to attach Middleware
  • 12
    Clean Documentation
  • 11
    Simple
  • 11
    Convention over Configuration
  • 10
    Easy Request Validatin
  • 9
    Simpler
  • 9
    Easy to use
  • 9
    Fast
  • 8
    Get going quickly straight out of the box. BYOKDM
  • 8
    Laravel + Cassandra = Killer Framework
  • 8
    Its just wow
  • 8
    Friendly API
  • 7
    Super easy and powerful
  • 7
    Simplistic , easy and faster
  • 7
    Less dependencies
  • 6
    Its beautiful to code in
  • 6
    Great customer support
  • 5
    Speed
  • 5
    Laravel Mix
  • 5
    Minimum system requirements
  • 5
    Easy
  • 5
    The only "cons" is wrong! No static method just Facades
  • 5
    Fast and Clarify framework
  • 5
    Active Record
  • 5
    Php7
  • 4
    Composer
  • 4
    Easy views handling and great ORM
  • 4
    Eloquent
  • 4
    Laragon
  • 3
    Ease of use
  • 3
    Laravel Forge and Envoy
  • 3
    Laravel Horizon and Telescope
  • 3
    Laravel Passport
  • 3
    Cashier with Braintree and Stripe
  • 3
    Intuitive usage
  • 3
    Laravel Spark
  • 3
    Laravel Nova
  • 3
    Laravel casher
  • 2
    Scout
  • 2
    Rapid development
  • 1
    Lovely
  • 1
    Deployment
  • 1
    Succint sintax
  • 1
    Laravel Vite
CONS OF LARAVEL
  • 48
    PHP
  • 31
    Too many dependency
  • 22
    Slower than the other two
  • 17
    A lot of static method calls for convenience
  • 15
    Too many include
  • 12
    Heavy
  • 8
    Bloated
  • 7
    Laravel
  • 6
    Confusing
  • 5
    Too underrated
  • 3
    Not fast with MongoDB
  • 1
    Difficult to learn
  • 1
    Not using SOLID principles

related Laravel posts

I need to build a web application plus android and IOS apps for an enterprise, like an e-commerce portal. It will have intensive use of MySQL to display thousands (40-50k) of live product information in an interactive table (searchable, filterable), live delivery tracking. It has to be secure, as it will handle information on customers, sales, inventory. Here is the technology stack: Backend: Laravel 7 Frondend: Vue.js, React or AngularJS?

Need help deciding technology stack. Thanks.

See more
Antonio Sanchez

Back at the start of 2017, we decided to create a web-based tool for the SEO OnPage analysis of our clients' websites. We had over 2.000 websites to analyze, so we had to perform thousands of requests to get every single page from those websites, process the information and save the big amounts of data somewhere.

Very soon we realized that the initial chosen script language and database, PHP, Laravel and MySQL, was not going to be able to cope efficiently with such a task.

By that time, we were doing some experiments for other projects with a language we had recently get to know, Go , so we decided to get a try and code the crawler using it. It was fantastic, we could process much more data with way less CPU power and in less time. By using the concurrency abilites that the language has to offers, we could also do more Http requests in less time.

Unfortunately, I have no comparison numbers to show about the performance differences between Go and PHP since the difference was so clear from the beginning and that we didn't feel the need to do further comparison tests nor document it. We just switched fully to Go.

There was still a problem: despite the big amount of Data we were generating, MySQL was performing very well, but as we were adding more and more features to the software and with those features more and more different type of data to save, it was a nightmare for the database architects to structure everything correctly on the database, so it was clear what we had to do next: switch to a NoSQL database. So we switched to MongoDB, and it was also fantastic: we were expending almost zero time in thinking how to structure the Database and the performance also seemed to be better, but again, I have no comparison numbers to show due to the lack of time.

We also decided to switch the website from PHP and Laravel to JavaScript and Node.js and ExpressJS since working with the JSON Data that we were saving now in the Database would be easier.

As of now, we don't only use the tool intern but we also opened it for everyone to use for free: https://tool-seo.com

See more
XAMPP logo

XAMPP

123
258
6
A free and open-source cross-platform web server solution stack package
123
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+ 1
6
PROS OF XAMPP
  • 6
    Easy set up and installation of files
CONS OF XAMPP
    Be the first to leave a con

    related XAMPP posts

    Shared insights
    on
    XAMPPXAMPPNGINXNGINX

    Hello everyone! I'm working on a web application, it will be deployed in a private local network so I need to choose which server I will use, so I need to know which one between NGINX and XAMPP, ps: I used to work with XAMPP since everything is integrated

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    Helfried Plenk
    Senior Partner at IBS IT-DL GmbH · | 1 upvote · 210.1K views
    Shared insights
    on
    MAMPMAMPXAMPPXAMPPJoomla!Joomla!

    installing a local Joomla! 3.9 website for testing - I already downloaded an installed XAMPP - when now reading some other docs I found mentioned MAMP ... have I to change?

    See more
    PuPHPet logo

    PuPHPet

    8
    12
    0
    A simple GUI to set up virtual machines for Web development
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    12
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    PROS OF PUPHPET
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      CONS OF PUPHPET
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        HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) logo

        HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)

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        An open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in Hack and PHP
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        PROS OF HHVM (HIPHOP VIRTUAL MACHINE)
        • 30
          Very fast
        • 24
          Drop-in PHP replacement
        • 14
          Works well with nginx
        • 14
          Backed by Facebook
        • 12
          Open source
        • 1
          Statically checked, typed language
        CONS OF HHVM (HIPHOP VIRTUAL MACHINE)
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          related HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) posts

          Azure Virtual Machines logo

          Azure Virtual Machines

          83
          77
          7
          It provides on-demand, high-scale, secure, virtualized infrastructure
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          7
          PROS OF AZURE VIRTUAL MACHINES
          • 1
            Free Tier
          • 1
            Flexible
          • 1
            Reliable
          • 1
            Backed by Azure
          • 1
            Auto Scale
          • 1
            Scalability
          • 1
            Low Cost
          CONS OF AZURE VIRTUAL MACHINES
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            related Azure Virtual Machines posts

            GraalVM logo

            GraalVM

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            A universal virtual machine for running applications (by Oracle)
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            0
            PROS OF GRAALVM
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                Multipass logo

                Multipass

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                Instant Ubuntu VMs
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                PROS OF MULTIPASS
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