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.