Help Develop PHP: 5.6 RC1 on Homestead

Last week we talked about Laravel Homestead, a prepared local development environment for PHP built on Vagrant by Taylor Otwell, meant to serve as a common starting point for all Laravel (and possibly other PHP) projects. If you’ve missed that post, I encourage you to give it a read and get familiar with Homestead as your next starting environment.
A week before that, we talked about the end of beta for 5.6, and the beginning of the RC program. The PHP core development team encourages people to play around and test with RC editions, and to submit build feedback back to them, so that they may gather some usage statistics and possible build errors to address in the next release. PHP 5.6 RC1 has been released some days ago, and can be downloaded.
In this post, we’ll have a quick look at how we can install it over the regular PHP in Laravel Homestead and report the build feedback back to the QA site.

Set up

To prepare, please read the original Homestead article and follow it to the letter until you have a working VM up and running.