Cannot access Symfony app on Homestead VM - symfony

Question

I have been trying to get a Symfony app to run on Homestead. Each time I try to load the site http://homestead.app my browser says "This site can’t be reached". I am not sure why this is happening. The process I followed was:
Create a Symfony application on my Linux mint host system:
mkdir ~/dev/sites/symfony
cd ~/dev/sites/symfony
symfony new my_project. This creates Symfony application in: "~/dev/sites/symfony/my_project"
composer require --dev laravel/homestead
php vendor/bin/homestead make
Edit Homestead config file vim Homestead.yaml
vagrant up
"Homestead.yaml" file contains:
ip: 192.168.10.10
memory: 2048
cpus: 1
provider: virtualbox
authorize: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
keys:
- ~/.ssh/id_rsa
folders:
-
map: ~/dev/sites/symfony
to: /home/vagrant/Code
sites:
-
map: homestead.app
to: /home/vagrant/Code/my_project/web
type: symfony
databases:
- homestead
name: symfony
hostname: symfony
When I try to access the site through Chrome browser I get a 'The site can't be reached'. I checked the nginx config, but looks ok to me:
server {
listen 80;
listen 443 ssl http2;
server_name homestead.app;
root "/home/vagrant/Code/my_project/web";
index index.html index.htm index.php app_dev.php;
charset utf-8;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /app_dev.php?$query_string;
}
location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
location = /robots.txt { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
access_log off;
error_log /var/log/nginx/homestead.app-ssl-error.log error;
sendfile off;
client_max_body_size 100m;
# DEV
location ~ ^/(app_dev|app_test|config)\.php(/|$) {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.1-fpm.sock;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_intercept_errors off;
fastcgi_buffer_size 16k;
fastcgi_buffers 4 16k;
}
# PROD
location ~ ^/app\.php(/|$) {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.1-fpm.sock;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_intercept_errors off;
fastcgi_buffer_size 16k;
fastcgi_buffers 4 16k;
internal;
}
location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}
ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/homestead.app.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/homestead.app.key;
}
If I try to ping the site from host system ping homestead.app it is translating the address to 192.168.10.10 but fails to return a ping response. This indicated that the URL is being correctly mapped to the IP address.
I checked the '/etc/hosts' config for both host and guest systems. On the host system there is an entry for homestead.app which maps to 192.168.10.10. I noticed that in the guest system the hosts file only mapped homestead instead of 'homestead.app'. I updated the hosts file to include both. However, that didn't make any difference.