First off, the idea on my mind is to advise getting homestead and vagrant up and running and then start creating your first Laravel app.  I know you need to reference your working folder, but that is something you can make as you go.  I had to update composer with the vagrant with the homestead ssh command.

So far, PHP version was right on.  I did run into other issues sadly.  There was a issue with the a file loading, and  determined that composer install had to be run again in the vagrant server with the app folder.

composer install

This re downloaded the dependences that didn’t download the first time.  Also, the was a encryption issue and I ran in the app folder

php artisan key:generate

Not to bad so far.   But I was running into another issue with the host file not directing traffic to the learning-laravel-5.dev to the vagrant host.  It found it was a stupid mistake.  I was editing a /etc/host file which should have been /etc/hosts file.  I must have created that file.

Part 2

I was able to review lesson 3 from laracast fundamentals. It was a bit different the the current version, but easy for me to line up the changes.

https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-5-fundamentals/episodes/3