Homestead

Laravel Homestead is a virtual web application environment which runs on Vagrant and VirtualBox and can be run on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system.

Using Homestead will save you the headache of setting up an development environment from scratch. It will also ensure you have an identical environment to the one I'm using, which will make it easier for you to follow along with this book.

If you don't have Homestead installed on your computer, follow the directions in the Laravel documentation:https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/homestead. Use the default configuration options.

Once you've installed Homestead and launched the Vagrant box with thevagrant upcommand, you're ready to continue.