Zend Framework/Homestead Integration

2018-05-16 | By: Matthew Weier O'Phinney

Last year, we wrote about using Laravel Homestead with ZF projects. Today, we contributed some changes to Homestead to simplify setting it up to serve Apigility, Expressive, and Zend Framework projects.

As of version 7.6.0, Homestead users can now define sites with any of the following "type" values:

apigility
expressive
zf

When one of these values is used, Homestead will setup the nginx instance used by Homestead to properly to work with the project.

Getting started

Much of what we detailed last year is still true:

You will need to add the laravel/homestead box to Vagrant: vagrant box add laravel/homestead.
You will likely want to use the vagrant-hostsupdater plugin to Vagrant to facilitate mapping the VM IP address and server name to your system hosts file: vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater.
You will need to temporarily add the laravel/homestead package as a development dependency to your application: composer require --dev laravel/homestead.
You will need to use the Homestead tooling to create a Vagrantfile and Homestead.yaml configuration file: ./vendor/bin/homestead make.

Configuring Homestead

Once you have your Homestead.yaml file created, you can edit it. The two things we need specifically are:

A folder mapping the application root directory to a directory in the vagrant image.
A site definition.

Generally, the folder mapping is already present, and will look something like the following:

folders:
  - map: /home/username/dev/application
    to: /home/vagrant/code

If you want the Homestead.yaml to be portable, however, you can tell it to map the current directory, and not a fully qualified path:

folders:
  - map: .
    to: /home/vagrant/code

Next, we'll look at the site definition. After you first run homestead make, you should have the following:

sites:
  - map: homestead.test
    to: /home/vagrant/code/public

Let's change this a bit. First, we'll give a new site name, then a site type (I'll use "expressive" here, but you can change this to "apigility" or "zf" based on your application), and we'll enable Z-Ray.

sites:
  - map: expressive.test
    to: /home/vagrant/code/public
    type: expressive
    zray: "true"

Yes, the correct value for the zray setting is "true"; see this issue for details.

From here, we can finally get running:

$ vagrant up

If you are not using the vagrant-hostsupdater plugin, you'll need to add an entry to your system hosts file:

192.168.10.10 expressive.test

Fin

We're hoping having this support in place will allow Zend Framework zend-mvc, Apigility, and Expressive developers to create and share development environments easily between their teams. If you have additional features you would like enabled by default (e.g., auto-detection of ZF, Apigility, and Expressive applications by homestead make, additional default nginx configuration, etc.), be sure to swing by the Slack or forums and ask!

I want to extend a hearty thank you to Joe Ferguson for helping me provide the integration, and guiding me through the contribution process for Homestead.

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