Simple Way To Install Laravel Homestead For A PHP 5.6 Project

If you’re running a recent version of Laravel Homestead (PHP 7) and you need to install an old Laravel app, in my case 5.0. You’ll run into difficulties as 5.0 is not compatible with PHP 7.

Here’s how to set up Laravel Homestead with PHP 5.6 for the project.

SSH into your current Homestead box and change the directory to the Laravel 5.0 project.

cd ~/Homestead
vagrant ssh
cd ~/Code/laravel50

Require Homestead v2.2.2 for the project. composer require --dev laravel/homestead 2.2.2

After it has installed, run the make command to generate the Vagrantfile and Homestead.yaml files.

php vendor/bin/homestead make

Once this is done, exit the SSH session and change directory to the project path on your host machine. Now boot the vagrant box:

vagrant up

This will download the v0.3.3 box and boot it.

You may see a warning message about using a password to execute a MySQL query on the command line. This might be because the MySQL password has expired.

SSH into the box and login to MySQL:

vagrant ssh
mysql -u homestead -p
secret
SET PASSWORD = 'secret';
exit

Then to complete the provisioning:

vagrant provision

This will run the remaining scripts, then you should be good to go!