i think so. there is a homestead box for php7

that's what i thought too, but vanilla PHP works on my VM but laravel wont

what do you get? i mean any errors ?

the one i posted above.

ah. missed that srry

take a look at this https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/general-discussion/laravel5-upgrade-issue/replies/95688

Install pdo extension and try again.

If you are using remi repository, run this: sudo yum install php70-php-pdo

Make sure php7.0-mbstring is loaded.

Yes PHP 7 is supported with latest Laravel versions. In fact, Laravel performs much better with PHP 7. Here are the performance benchmark of Laravel with PHP7:

During the test, the blitz tool generated 29,214 hits successfully in 300 seconds. The Laravel app received 420.31 MB of data. The average hit rate of 97/sec translates to about 8,413,632 per day.

Source: https://www.cloudways.com/blog/laravel-5-benchmarks-php-5-6-and-7/