In Laravel, we often use `artisan vendor:publish` to copy views, notifications etc from dependencies so that they can be customized. These views are created in <type>/vendor/<dependency> directory.

When using the current gitignore for Laravel, vendor is inserted like vendor/ which ignores all the directories named vendor anywhere in the source tree, including the customized views.

The proposed file change tries to fix this problem by ensuring only the root vendor directory is ignored by git.

ref: https://github.com/laravel/laravel/pull/4121

Ref: https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/master/.gitignore#L2

Ignore Homestead related config files

/vendor - composer modules can be (and probably should) recompiled. Laravel comes with this line by default.
/node_modules - npm modules, same of /vendor.  Laravel comes with this line by default.

/app/storage - Laravel things that can be despised (in staging) like cache, views cache and sessions

Laravel 5 uses vlucas/phpdotenv for env configuration.
http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/configuration#environment-configuration
Previous version used env.php files. the new configuration files do not have
.php extension

Laravel4 is the current standard.

This resolves the name with the custom Laravel.gitignore file in the
gitignore.io project. If support for Laravel3 is desired, it should be done in
a new file: "Laravel3.gitignore

Closes #1196