Vagrant is great to isolate a development environment inside a VM. However, after a while you can find you have a bunch of heavy VMs that share the same characteristics, each one for a simple PHP project.

Enter Laravel Homestead

In these cases, you can safely use Laravel Homestead. Homestead is a Vagrant box pre-configured with an Nginx web server, PHP 5.6, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and other stuff to make development easier and faster.

The documentation is pretty clear and in a few steps you can have a working development environment, where you can add multiple projects.

Chek it out: Laravel Homestead

Update: Also, I recently found a simple guide on how to install MailCatcher on Homestead, which is really useful: Installing MailCatcher in Laravel Homestead