How to destroy and recreate vagrant/homestead machine? - laravel

Question

I'm running Laravel on Vagrant Box (homestead)
When I'm doing vagrant up, I'm getting a message:
: A newer version of the box 'laravel/homestead' is available and already
: installed, but your Vagrant machine is running against
: version '6.3.0'. To update to version '7.1.0',
: destroy and recreate your machine.
What commands should I run and what are potential problems I should be prepared for?

Answer 1

You can create a second installation for Homestead before you destroy the working one.
1) follow official documentation on installing Installing The Homestead Vagrant Box, then, when Installing Homestead instead of this command
git clone https://github.com/laravel/homestead.git ~/Homestead
run this one
git clone https://github.com/laravel/homestead.git ~/MyHomestead
then you'll need to cd ~/MyHomestead and git checkout v8.4.0
now you need to go to ~\MyHomestead\scripts\homestead.rb file and replace homestead-7 to homestead-7-my it will give you a different name for virtual machine in your virtualbox.
Now you can follow the official documentation
1.1) and you can always destroy your old vagrant box from your vagrant folder usually ~/homestead by running
vagrant destroy
2) create a new vagrant box by running
vagrant up --provision
3) get in to vagrant
vagrant ssh
4) go to your project (I assume you have a set of database migrations and seeders )
cd ~/code/myproject
4.1) you'll find redis and mysql is working there already.
5) create database
php artisan migrate
6) make SUPERVISOR works if you need it
7) make cron work if you need it
Done

Answer 2

As ceejayoz mentioned, you do not have to do this, you can just continue running the same version. Homestead is meant to be able to be torn down / built back up quickly, with all configuration living within the Homestead.yaml and Vagrantfile files. It's supposed to be able to do the heavy lifting for you with those config files.
As you mentioned, you have your database in Homestead. If you have some data there that is not local test data, ensure you get that exported before destroying. Some people manually modify their Homestead VM via SSH which is not recommended (as you should be using the Homestead.yaml file for changes), but if you have, keep a list of the changes you made and where you made them.
Here is a rundown of things you may want to keep before destroying:
Your Homestead.yaml file, just in case
Your Vagrantfile file(s) (if you've made custom changes)
Database data
Files used / generated by your application (logs, for instance.)
aliases file, if you've made custom changes to it
Elasticsearch data (if you use it)
Neo4j data (if you use it)
As for commands to run, the documentation says it better than I ever could: https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/homestead#updating-homestead