Incase you are not interested in homestead and you are using ubuntu you can easily set your environment up with the following steps

1.install the necessary dependencies composer, apache , php 7 and make sure the necessary php modules are enabled eg mycrpt gd library etc or higher  I will be covering that in another tutorial. then create a folder where all your files will be , ours will be called website located in my home directory. This is where my laravel project will be installed called school

2 . give a name to your site whch you cam access it on the url like for me im using school.local  so you go to your home dir and run

$  sudo nano /etc/hosts   

#   and add

127.0.0.1  school.local

#then save and exit

3. you need to configure the folder where you will be keeping all your project files, mine is a folder called websites so to do that first run

$ sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

#then you dump this below in the file

<Directory /home/plumptre/websites/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>

# notice that the path of the file was written well “<Directory /home/plumptre/websites/>” this will let apache know that that folder is where you want your projects to be, save and exit

4.    cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/ and do ls -lah

#then do

$ sudo cp 000-default.conf  school.conf

# this will copy the defult content into the school.conf file which i am just creating, u can use another name but I am using school here because its a school project I am working on, after that run

$ sudo nano school.conf

#then make sure you hve a setting like this below, the path, email and name should be set

ServerName school.local
ServerAdmin ademola@overallheuristic.com
DocumentRoot /home/plumptre/websites/school/public

#After that save and exit

5. run

sudo a2ensite school.conf

service apache2 reload

then visit http://school.local  and you are good to go