Vagrant vs. Homestead

homestead is just a "wrapper" around vagrant and provides all required software for laravel and setup your nginx vhosts etc.

So if you are working with laravel i would use homestead.

Because homestead up and vagrant up you could setup an alias in your shell. So i only have to type hup and my homestead machine is booting. After this i only type vm to log in into my homestead vm.

alias vm="ssh vagrant@127.0.0.1 -p 2222"
alias vup="vagrant up"
alias hup="homestead up"

Note that i used "ssh vagrant@127.0.0.1 -p 2222 instead of homestead ssh. This command is WAY FASTER then typing homestead ssh. You get logged in within a milli second.

Thank you. So you are using Homestead even for Non-Laravel projects?

Yes if the project requires the same software. I am also working with other Systems like https://en.shopware.com/

Therefore i am using its own Vagrant Machine. I think it depends on your project and what are the needs to get it up and running.

I am also using forge to deploy non laravel projects and it works perfectly.

People think Homestead is magic and different from normal Vagrant. It's not. Customise it as you want, it's just some fancy commands and script to install stuff.