Oh hi! I'm Yannick Chenot, a French web developer contractor based in London.
I currently work on a Laravel project composed of multiple microservices that I run locally using Homestead (box v0.4.0 at the time of writing). As I started tinkering around I noticed that requesting the different APIs was super slow, up to 20s per request, which was really unexpected (and annoying to say the least).
For quite some time now I have been prefering accessing databases from the CLI, but sometimes it can feel overkill when wanting to quickly check or update something, say.
There are a few tutorials out there about how to set up Sublime Text and Xdebug so they play nice together. The good news is that in our case, Homestead has covered the configuration of Xdebug for us: the tool is already available and reporting for duty.
Homestead offers a nice pre-packaged environment. But as a project grows in complexity, there will be a time where extra packages will be necessary. How to install them properly, and not to lose everything any time we need to recreate the box? How does one extend Homestead?
I wrote this short get-started guide mainly for my own use, to have a reference handy to quickly set up a new Laravel project with a MySQL database. But as I felt the need to write it, one might find some interest in it as well.