Launching the Homestead Virtual Machine

Now, let's proceed to launch the Vagrant box with Homestead.yaml file:

1. To launch the Homestead virtual machine for the first time or if you have made any changes to the Homestead.yaml file. Run the command,vagrant up --provision. And if you have not made any changes to the Homestead.yaml file. Run command vagrant up.

// Run command if you made changes to Homestead.yaml file
vagrant up --provision

// Run command if no changes made to Homestead.yaml file
vagrant up --provision

1. Open command terminal and change directory to homestead directory. Always run vagrant command inside the homestead directory.

vagrant up --provision

Always run vagrant command inside the homestead directory

1. During the first launch, Vagrant will download the necessary resources, which may take a while depending on the speed of your internet connection.

1. To access the Vagrant box via SSH, run the following command:

vagrant ssh

This will open a SSH connection to the Vagrant box, allowing you to run commands and interact with the environment.

1. Open Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager and you will see the homestead virtual machine running.

That's it! You have successfully launched the Vagrant box with Laravel Homestead using either the vagrant up or vagrant up --provision command, depending on whether or not you needed to re-provision the box.

In the next topic, let's try to create a Laravel project in Homestead virtual machine and to test the hostname resolution.