3. It’s Fast to Set Up

2. It’s Otwell Approved Homestead being official, as in, made by Taylor Otwell, the father of Laravel, means it’s automatically assumed to hold to certain standards. While the Laravel community isn’t without its drama (who cares what a class is called? If a revolutionary new framework calls a model a potato, a facade, or a rocketship, it’s perfectly fine as long as the potato/facade/rocketship works), it’s the exclusivity of Taylor’s involvement with it that gives it a note of simplicity and quality that’s much needed in today’s PHP world. We’ve seen far too many open source projects ruined by team egos, zealous contributors, or incompetent jacks-of-all-trades and it’s my personal opinion that Taylor’s almost exclusive involvement in Laravel’s betterment is what makes it shine above the rest and truly allows it to compete with Phalcon in quality. Homestead is his own project, termed the “official local development environment”, and he’ll do everything he can to keep it high quality and make sure it always works. Anything less, and it’s a smudge on his reputation. In PHP these days, there’s no better guarantee of a project’s long term reliability, than it being (mostly) owned by a person who cares that much about quality. 3. It’s Fast to Set Up Setting Homestead up is a piece of cake. Following the instructions on the documentation page, all you need to do is add the homestead box to your Vagrant (if you don’t have it yet) and clone the repo.

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