Laravel Homestead vs XAMPP

Overview

XAMPP

Stacks142

Followers272

Votes6

Laravel Homestead

Stacks277

Followers343

Votes33

GitHub Stars3.9K

Forks1.4K

Laravel Homestead vs XAMPP: What are the differences?

Installation and Configuration: The key difference between Laravel Homestead and XAMPP is the installation and configuration process. Laravel Homestead is a virtual machine that includes all the necessary tools and dependencies pre-installed, making it easier and faster to set up a development environment. On the other hand, XAMPP is a software package that needs to be manually installed and configured on the host machine. This can be more time-consuming and require more technical knowledge.
Operating System Compatibility: Another difference is the operating system compatibility. Laravel Homestead is compatible with various operating systems like Windows, macOS, and Linux. It provides a consistent development experience across different platforms. In contrast, XAMPP is primarily targeted for Windows, but it also has versions available for macOS and Linux, although with some limitations.
Web Server Configuration: Laravel Homestead comes with Nginx as the default web server, offering better performance and scalability compared to the traditional Apache server used by XAMPP. Nginx is known for its ability to handle high traffic loads and efficiently serve static files. XAMPP, on the other hand, uses Apache as the default web server but also allows the option to switch to Nginx.
Database Management: Laravel Homestead provides a convenient way to manage databases through tools like MySQL Workbench and phpMyAdmin. It allows developers to easily create, modify, and interact with databases within the virtual machine environment. In contrast, XAMPP includes phpMyAdmin for database management but lacks the seamless integration with development tools provided by Laravel Homestead.
Containerization and Isolation: Laravel Homestead utilizes virtual machines and technologies like Vagrant and VirtualBox to provide containerization and isolation. This means that each project runs in its own isolated environment, ensuring that changes or issues with one project do not affect others. XAMPP, on the other hand, does not offer the same level of isolation and projects share the same system resources, which can lead to conflicts and compatibility issues.
Development Workflow: Laravel Homestead promotes a more modern and streamlined development workflow. It comes pre-installed with popular development tools like Composer and Artisan, making it easier to manage dependencies and run various commands. XAMPP, although it provides a development environment, does not offer the same level of tooling and automation, requiring manual installations and configurations.

In Summary, Laravel Homestead offers a more streamlined and consistent development experience compared to XAMPP by providing a pre-configured virtual machine, operating system compatibility, better web server performance, convenient database management tools, containerization and isolation, and a modern development workflow.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

XAMPP	Laravel Homestead
It consists mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MariaDB database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages.	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.
-	Ubuntu 14.04;PHP 5.6;HHVM;Nginx;MySQL;Postgres;Node (With Bower, Grunt, and Gulp);Redis;Memcached;Beanstalkd;Laravel Envoy;Fabric + HipChat Extension
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 3.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.4K
Stacks 142	Stacks 277
Followers 272	Followers 343
Votes 6	Votes 33
Pros & Cons
Pros 6 Easy set up and installation of files	Pros 19 Easy to setup 13 Native enviroment 1 Cool if you finally get it set up 4 Win10 by night Devs
Integrations
No integrations available	Laravel Vagrant Vagrant Cloud

What are some alternatives to XAMPP, Laravel Homestead?

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

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.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Related Comparisons

Laravel Homestead vs XAMPP: What are the differences?

Installation and Configuration: The key difference between Laravel Homestead and XAMPP is the installation and configuration process. Laravel Homestead is a virtual machine that includes all the necessary tools and dependencies pre-installed, making it easier and faster to set up a development environment. On the other hand, XAMPP is a software package that needs to be manually installed and configured on the host machine. This can be more time-consuming and require more technical knowledge.
Operating System Compatibility: Another difference is the operating system compatibility. Laravel Homestead is compatible with various operating systems like Windows, macOS, and Linux. It provides a consistent development experience across different platforms. In contrast, XAMPP is primarily targeted for Windows, but it also has versions available for macOS and Linux, although with some limitations.
Web Server Configuration: Laravel Homestead comes with Nginx as the default web server, offering better performance and scalability compared to the traditional Apache server used by XAMPP. Nginx is known for its ability to handle high traffic loads and efficiently serve static files. XAMPP, on the other hand, uses Apache as the default web server but also allows the option to switch to Nginx.
Database Management: Laravel Homestead provides a convenient way to manage databases through tools like MySQL Workbench and phpMyAdmin. It allows developers to easily create, modify, and interact with databases within the virtual machine environment. In contrast, XAMPP includes phpMyAdmin for database management but lacks the seamless integration with development tools provided by Laravel Homestead.
Containerization and Isolation: Laravel Homestead utilizes virtual machines and technologies like Vagrant and VirtualBox to provide containerization and isolation. This means that each project runs in its own isolated environment, ensuring that changes or issues with one project do not affect others. XAMPP, on the other hand, does not offer the same level of isolation and projects share the same system resources, which can lead to conflicts and compatibility issues.
Development Workflow: Laravel Homestead promotes a more modern and streamlined development workflow. It comes pre-installed with popular development tools like Composer and Artisan, making it easier to manage dependencies and run various commands. XAMPP, although it provides a development environment, does not offer the same level of tooling and automation, requiring manual installations and configurations.

Laravel Homestead vs XAMPP

Overview