Laravel Homestead/Vagrant/Virtualbox is slow on Windows

Question

I have installed Laravel Homestead/Vagrant/Virtualbox on Windows as it said on official site

But it is really slow. Page update takes about

Answer 1

NFS stands for Network File System and you need it for speed.

Laravel homestead tutorial does not say what NFS is and why you need it, which is why I ignored it on the initial install.

1) On your Windows host, install the plugin that adds NFS support to vagrant in Windows.

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-winnfsd

2) Go to Homestead.yaml, it usually sits in C:\Users\username\Homestead\Homestead.yaml

3) Add type: "nfs" in the folders section like so:

folders:
    - map: ~/code
      to: /home/vagrant/code
      type: "nfs"

4) Run vagrant up --provision

Result:

The speed increases, as in @phazei's answer, from 8 to 2 seconds for each request, but it is much less work. @phazei's answer clarifies some background processes.

I tested it on windows 10 with Oracle Virtualbox-5.2.12, vagrant version-2.1.1.

Please note: Vagrant NFS page says

Windows users: NFS folders do not work on Windows hosts. Vagrant will ignore your request for NFS synced folders on Windows.

But if you have the plugin, you can ignore it.

Answer 2

On laracasts forum the author named @phazei has answered it 3 years ago

What he said was:

1) on your Windows host install plugin that adds NFS support to vagrant in Windows.

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-winnfsd

2) find your homestead.rb

I found it in

C:\Users\username\Homestead\scripts

even though he suggested to look at

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Composer\vendor\laravel\homestead\scripts

3)

Find the section where it's already looping through the settings["folders"] and replace it with the nfs code.

for me it was somewhere about line 140.

So, I commented out all statement if settings.include? 'folders' ... end

and added this instead:

    # EDIT:
    # Reorder folders for winnfsd plugin compatilibty
    # see https://github.com/GM-Alex/vagrant-winnfsd/issues/12#issuecomment-78195957
    settings["folders"].sort! { |a,b| a["map"].length <=> b["map"].length }

    # Register All Of The Configured Shared Folders
    if settings.include? 'folders'
        settings["folders"].each do |folder|
          config.vm.synced_folder folder["map"], folder["to"], 
          id: folder["map"],
          :nfs => true,
          :mount_options => ['nolock,vers=3,udp,noatime']
        end
    end

4) Then restarted vagrant with halt/up and my page load speed increased from 8 to 2 seconds.

Thank you @phazei. Your answer is still working after 3 years.

PS

I tested it on windows 10 with Oracle Virtualbox-5.2.12, vagrant version-2.1.1.

PPS

You can run vagrant up --provision, it will not affect the change you have made in homestead.rb