Welcome to this Laravel Homestead course! 

Laravel is a very popular PHP framework that allows developers to create really cool applications, easily and fast. As you progress in your understanding of Laravel and your start creating more and more projects, you come to the realization that you need a little more power and flexibility; That's where Homestead comes in. 

Laravel Homestead is a package or as some of us call it a "box" full of Laravel goodies inside. Right out of the box Laravel Homestead includes ....

• Ubuntu 16.04
  
• Git
  
• PHP 7.1
  
• Nginx
  
• MySQL
  
• MariaDB
  
• Sqlite3
  
• Postgres
  
• Composer
  
• Node (With Yarn, PM2, Bower, Grunt, and Gulp)
  
• Redis
  
• Memcached
  
• Beanstalkd

As you can see, here is everything you need to start creating projects right away. The great thing about this, is that your environment is totally portable. You can give your configuration file to a friend, co-worker and they can be up an running in minutes, exactly with the same tools you have in yours. 

Another great advantage of having a virtual environment for our Laravel projects is that we don't have to install any of these softwares into our computer directly, this will prevent issues that can affect other development environments that we might have. 

If you are ready to be more productive with Laravel then take this course, and I see you inside!