I'm a newb, just starting out with Laravel development (using Homestead for an eventual cloud deployment). I am using PhpStorm on my windows 10 machine, with the homestead VM on a Centos 7 server (hosting the VM). I am "deploying" my PhpStorm project to the Linux server where it is mapped to the local homestead VM.
I've been running through some tutorials but my setup is either not common, or I just haven't gotten to a tutorial that covers my setup. I have installed PHP 7, Composer and Vagrant on my Windows machine so I can configure both the VM and the project (via artisan) there, then deploy it all to the server. This was working ok until I ran into migration (and ran into a wall setting up my remote Linux MySQL database as a local PhpStorm data source).
I seem to be doing a lot of jury-rigging in my setup compared to the tutorials/articles I've been reading and would like some input as to whether my next logical step is to just install MySQL (the database I am using) on my Windows machine for the migration setup; or, should I set my development environment up in a completely different way?
Homestead is great for when you need some specific environment or perhaps multiple developers are working on a project and all want to use the same environment..
I did the whole Homestead thing for a few months and for someone with my simple needs, it was really just adding complexity and taking away time from coding..
If you don't have specific needs, save yourself a lot of time and headaches and try https://laragon.org/
Thanks for the input SaeedPrez, I had seen Laragon mentioned in articles but wasn't aware of what it was. I'll check it out further but for now I'm pretty happy testing my app on a platform I'm pretty sure I'll be using for deployment (Centos 7) and have a machine readily at hand (Laragon may do that as well and I'll be checking it out today or tomorrow).
This is actually a question of whether I 'can' develop on windows and transfer the final/complete code to the test machine. If not, something like Laragon might be what I need.
OK .. so I was able to migrate to a remote database using a dedicated database connection in database.php that authenticates to a user with the required permissions. I also learned how to use multiple migration paths in order to allow for migrating to multiple databases. So, my current development environment seems to be working fine for now.