Homestead V5.0.0 Is Released

A new version of Homestead has been released: version 5.0.1. The base box has been upgraded to version 2.0.0.

Holy version numbers Batman! In keeping with Semantic Versioning for both Homestead and Settler, the number of changes warrants a major version change. For the most part (Your mileage may vary, but I’m sure it’s easier than upgrading from 5.3 to 5.4, and that’s easy enough!), you shouldn’t have to do much to upgrade.

#What’s New in Settler 2.0.0

#New Stuff

We have removed HHVM. Laravel hasn’t supported HHVM in the past two versions, and I would rather remove a feature such as this, in a known working state, rather than waiting to hear it is broken and having to fix it. We can easily warn users if they want to use HHVM in Homestead, they will have to use Homestead 4.x and Settler 1.x. If this is a complete nuclear bomb to your workflow, please reach out to me. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but the number of users I see talking about HHVM on Homestead is near zero.

The UTF8mb4 character set is now default! Databases will be created with this set by default so you can store emoji to your heart’s content. ❤️

ngrok is now installed by default. Check the share() alias information below.

#Bug Fixes

Some users have reported Homestead loses time and in an effort to find an easy resolution, we’ve installed and enabled ntpd on Homestead.

Previously, we were setting DebConf selections for the mysql-community-server package,then installing the mysql-server package. This is why you couldn’t log in as root. Thanks to GitHub user josecybertill for pointing out the bug.

MailHog will now automatically start on boot. Sorry for not catching this earlier; it was entirely my fault.

#What’s New in Homestead 5.0.1

#New Stuff

There’s no more .homestead folder! The days of hunting for your dot folder are over. Your particular Homestead configuration files will now be copied to the same folder as Homestead. To upgrade, just run the init script again, then copy any changes to Homestead.yaml, aliases, and after.sh to the newly created files.

Share alias has been added to easily share any of your sites to the public internet via ngrok. ngrok is an application which provides secure introspectable tunnels to localhost allowing you to easily share what you see on your local Homestead with users across the Internet. Take this feature for a test drive by running share homestead.app from inside the Vagrant machine. You will see the ngrok app start and show your unique and publicly accessible URLs. Remember, Vagrant is inherently insecure and you are exposing your virtual machine to the internet!

As mentioned in the Settler 2.0 notes, we have removed HHVM.

Homestead now requires box version 2.0.0 and Vagrant 1.9.0 as minimum requirements.

Serve aliases for SilverStripe, Statamic, and Apache have been added. The functions in the aliases file are now in alphabetical order because I know I wasn’t the only one being kept up at night by that. Also, two new aliases have been added: xon which will turn on the Xdebug extension for command line PHP. You can easily turn it back off via xoff.

Homestead executable (binary) has been moved to the bin/ folder. To follow conventions of most PHP projects we have moved our binary file to follow the established convention.

Homestead binary now requires PHP 5.6. This is a decision I went back and forth on, but ultimately came to the conclusion we shouldn’t be supporting any version PHP.net itself doesn’t support. Therefore, we now require at least 5.6 to run the Homestead binary.

Because I am terrible at remembering to update the file before I tag a release, CHANGELOG.md now contains a link to the releases page.

Homestead has supported YAML as its configuration file format since the earliest release. Many releases ago we added the functionality to use a JSON file instead of YAML. In this release, we’re also going to provide you with the option to create Homestead with either a YAML configuration file by default or JSON via a command line argument.

Also new in Homestead 5.0.1 is much better support for a JSON config file. Homestead has supported using a JSON version of your Homestead.yaml file for a while, but we have now updated the init.sh and init.bat scripts to support creating a JSON config file. If you would like to use the JSON format simply run the init script with an extra argument: sh init.sh json or ./init.bat json (for Windows). For those of you who prefer the per project installation method of Homestead, we have also updated the make command as well: php ./vendor/bin/homestead make --json.

#Bug Fixes

Thanks to Enrico Zimuel from Zend we now have unit tests covering the make command.

If you accidentally typo a mapped folder path in your Homestead.yaml, Vagrant will no longer crash in an epic fireball of Ruby errors. You should see a polite warning instead.

Huge thanks go out to the contributors that submitted pull requests, bug reports, and ideas for this version of Homestead.
Ready to update? Make sure you follow the documentation.