Hey folks... I'm relatively new to developing in Laravel and I have carefully avoided using Homestead up until now. I have tried installing it a few times, but I've always stranded somewhere and decided just to use MAMP.

So: I've started a new attempt and I'm wrapping my head around the first few steps as to get a better grasp of the whole concept. I understand the concept of a virtual machine and I think I understand that Homestead is the ideal virtual environment for Laravel developers, which Vagrant can help you install. But what I don't get is the following:

When I type "vagrant box add laravel/homestead" in the terminal it starts downloading a bunch of stuff and I would assume it is downloading Homestead. But after this part is said and done, I'm supposed to clone the Homestead repo from Github, which to me seems to mean I am downloading Homestead a second time (which can't possibly the case). So my question is: what am I downloading in the first step and what am I downloading in the second?

Thanks in advance for your replies!