cannot access '/home/vagrant/.composer/' No such file or directory
Generally caused when the locally installed version of Homestead is newer than an old version of Homestead that was used in the repo
The best bet is actually to update your composer.json on the project to use a more recent version of Homestead.
Watch commands not actually noticing file changes on windows
Generally caused by single quotes (') in the package.json commands. Resolve by replacing all single quotes (') with escaped double quotes (\")