Forgive me if this is old news, but hostname-based environment switching isn’t as nice as it could be; I like using *.dev for my development environments, but other people I know like *.development, *.local, etc. The truth of it is the more developers you have working on a project the higher chance you run of the application being run at a variety of hostnames, mucking up your bootstrap/start.php file.
Fortunately, Laravel doesn’t force us into using hostname-based environment switching. At work we’ve developed this little workflow, and it seems to be working really well.