
Running multiple Homestead boxes next to each other (PHP 7 and PHP 5.6)
Now that PHP 7 is being adopted by more and more web applications in production environments, dealing with legacy code in local development becomes increasingly more difficult because of the different PHP versions out there and deprecated functionality. The reason I’m writing this article is that for a big project, we’re planning a migration from PHP 5.6.15 to PHP 7.x, but had some issues with the legacy mcrypt extension (which we adapted from Laravel 4.2) in local development.
The mcrypt extension has been abandonware for nearly a decade now, and was also fairly complex to use. It has therefore been deprecated in favour of OpenSSL, where it will be removed from the core and into PECL in PHP 7.2.
I’ve been using Laravel homestead for years now because it’s such an easy tool for Laravel development. But it’s not that easy to setup a 2nd Laravel box, with an older PHP version. In this blog I’ll show you how to do it. Hopefully it will help other developers.
I’m assuming you already have a Homestead box up & running. Make a backup of your Homestead.yaml configs and save it someplace safe, because we’re going to start all over just to make sure. All your code is hosted locally anyway so you’re not going to lose anything, unless you made custom changes to the VM which is not a good idea anyway.
Remove all boxes:
vagrant global-status --prune id name provider state directory ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2d2e481 homestead56 virtualbox running /Users/Chris/Homestead56 1042da7 homestead7 virtualbox running /Users/Chris/Homestead vagrant destroy [id] |
Now let’s setup our new VM’s:
vagrant box add laravel/homestead vagrant box add laravel/homestead --box-version 0.3.3 |
Pull in Homestead:
cd ~ git clone https://github.com/laravel/homestead.git Homestead git clone https://github.com/laravel/homestead.git Homestead56 |
Here’s the tricky part, edit ~/Homestead56/init.sh, change the homesteadRoot variable. Otherwise it will try to overwrite the file in the other Homestead folder.
#!/usr/bin/env bash homesteadRoot=~/.homestead56 mkdir -p "$homesteadRoot" cp -i src/stubs/Homestead.yaml "$homesteadRoot/Homestead.yaml" cp -i src/stubs/after.sh "$homesteadRoot/after.sh" cp -i src/stubs/aliases "$homesteadRoot/aliases" echo "Homestead initialized!" |
Next run:
bash Homestead/init.sh bash Homestead56/init.sh |
This will publish the config files to ~/.homestead/ and ~/.homestead56/.
In order for both environments to function properly we’ll have to make a couple of changes to the Homestead.yaml files.
~/.homestead/Homestead.yaml:
-- ip: "192.168.10.10" name: "homestead7" memory: 2048 cpus: 1 provider: virtualbox authorize: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub keys: - ~/.ssh/id_rsa folders: - map: ~/Sites to: /home/vagrant/Sites sites: - map: randomapp.app to: /home/vagrant/Sites/randomapp/public databases: - homestead |
~/.homestead56/Homestead.yaml:
--- ip: "192.168.10.11" name: "homestead56" version: 0.3.3 memory: 2048 cpus: 1 provider: virtualbox authorize: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub keys: - ~/.ssh/id_rsa folders: - map: ~/Sites to: /home/vagrant/Sites sites: - map: randomapp.app to: /home/vagrant/Sites/randomapp/public databases: - homestead |
As you can see we’re setting up different IP’s for the VM’s (duh), specifying an easy-to-remember name, and most important of all, we’re setting the VM versions. These define what PHP version will be installed.
Bonus, symlink your vagrant commands to your VM environments.
vim ~/.bash_profile
# Homestead function homestead() { ( cd ~/Homestead && vagrant $* ) } function homestead7() { ( cd ~/Homestead && vagrant $* ) } function homestead56() { ( cd ~/Homestead56 && vagrant $* ) } |
Now you can do something like:
homestead56 up homestead56 ssh homestead7 up homestead7 ssh |
If you want more information on the available PHP / Homestead versions, try these links:
https://laravel.com/docs/5.4/homestead#old-versions
https://laravel-news.com/using-older-versions-of-homestead