Hey all,

Quite a while ago I forked the homestead repository and made a change, I created a PR and the reactions were pretty good. Although the PR hasn't been accepted yet, I feel that more people could benefit from this feature. It gives less overhead when you start your homestead-box.

The description of this PR is as follows:

This piece of code will enable vagrant to auto-update the hosts file if
the hostsupdater plugin has been installed. This can be enabled or disabled in the homestead.yaml file so it's up to the user to if he wants to use this or not.
If it has not been installed, it will not execute the code that wil add the domains to the hosts file.
(Supports: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

This takes out the fact that you manually have to edit your hosts file.

If this were to be accepted, you'd have to edit the documentation, take out the part about editing your hosts file and add     the following:

After you installed Vagrant, you will need to install an additional plugin that enables vagrant to automagically update     your hosts file so you can access your applications more easily.

vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater

The link is as follows: https://github.com/laravel/homestead/pull/91