Laravel Homestead 4.0 is released featuring support for PHP 7.1

Laravel Homestead the Vagrant box for easily running Laravel on any platform has just released v4.0 that includes support for the just released PHP 7.1.

The upgrade is easy but the instructions do vary depending on how you have it installed. Below is a quick run through on how it’s done:

Backup all your Homestead databases

This is not required since the box name has changed. However, it’s still not a bad idea so you don’t lose any of your test data:

vagrant@homestead:~/Sites$ mysqldump -u homestead -p --all-databases > alldbs.sql

Homestead Global Install

Next, if you have Homestead installed globally:

cd /path/to/homestead
git fetch origin
git checkout v4.0.0
vagrant destroy
rm -rf .vagrant
vagrant up

Homestead Per-Project Install

Or, if you have Homestead installed per project adjust the composer.json to reference the new version:

"laravel/homestead": "^4.0"

Next run the following commands:

composer update
vagrant destroy
rm -rf .vagrant
vagrant up

For more information on this release and to learn how to lock your Homestead version down to PHP 7 see this post by Joe Ferguson who helped put together this release.

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Editors note: Updated to add the tip for backing up all the databases first.