When creating a PHP website, there is a good chance that you wish to use a virtual machine. This has many benefits, like managing multiple versions of php, or extensions etc.
A lot of projects use vagrant in combination with virtual box. But nobody likes to set up a Vagrantfile every single time. Laravel created homestead, which deals with all the vagrant configuration for you. You can install it in your project with composer install laravel/homestead, and you got it.