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If the path contains spaces, then be sure to include it in double quotes to ensure 

spaces are escaped:

> cd "C:\path\to\your\Laravel Projects"

In the rest of this book, unless the example is specific to Windows, we will always use 

the 

$

 character to denote a shell command and use slashes as directory separators. 

Make sure you adapt the command accordingly, if you are running Windows.

Meet Homestead

If you wanted to develop PHP applications on your personal computer, you needed 

to have a web server installed and running locally. PHP is installed to interpret  

your scripts, and other utilities your website may need, such as working with a 

database. Your website or web application may even have a requirement for other 

services such as Memcached or Redis, which are popular caching systems. This 

saw the rise of utilities such as WampServer and MAMP to create environments for 

developing dynamic websites without getting connected to the Internet, but these 

required configuring.

Building on from installed environments like these, the recommended practice for 

developing dynamic websites and applications is to use virtual machines (VMs). 

These allow you to emulate your production web server's setup on your local 

machine. You can also use differently configured VMs for different projects—with 

a WAMP- or MAMP-like setup, every project had to use the same version of PHP, 

MySQL, and anything else you installed.

The creators of Laravel have created an official Vagrant box called Homestead. 

Vagrant is software that allows you to create virtual development environments 

on your personal computer. You can install Homestead and start creating Laravel 

projects right away. And if you don't need it any more, you can just remove it from 

your machine, without anything else being affected. Best of all, if you are currently 

using a globally installed development environment such as WAMP or MAMP, 

Homestead won't conflict with it.