Here, we'll be focusing mainly on the gritty details of Forge. What does it do? How? How can I use it today?

Homestead is a way to develop your Laravel sites locally that provides a consistent environment that's in line with Taylor's preferred development stack: Nginx, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Beanstalk, Redis, Memcached, and PHP 5.5 (at the moment.) Homestead is a pre-configured Vagrant box that matches the stack provided by Forge. Learn more about Homestead here.

Forge is a way to host your Laravel sites on a consistent, predictable, and flexible environment. It's a PAAS (platform as a service) that manages and simplifies the deployment of your code to Digital Ocean, Linode, Amazon EC2, or Rackspace, including creating a remote hosting environment with feature parity to Homestead so your dev and prod environments can be as close as possible. If you're familiar with FortRabbit, Heroku, or EngineYard Cloud, Forge is similar to those--but it's also pretty unique in a few ways.

So! Let's walk through the steps to getting your first Laravel app deployed on Forge.