Hey Serdiev,

Homestead is a vagrant box created by Tailor. Its used to make development and deployment of laravel apps easier and faster. You can have as many homesteads as you wish for development.

Think of it as a whole new machine given to you already bundled with all the dependencies(php, mysql, redis etc) you need to start developing laravel applications. And the only way you can access this machine is through the console.

It does not come with laravel in it, it is just a development environment. You need to download laravel into it, to start using it. About your issue with composer, Homestead comes with a shared directory to your host machine. So when you code your app from your host machine, it is automatically synced to the virtual machine in homestead.

Read more about how vagrant works, to get a better understanding of these concepts. The docs will also shine some light for you to understand.