PHP gettext returns input as result in Homestead

In a project of our company we use gettext to translate text. This has been working for several years, but now I am trying to run the project in Homestead, everything works fine except gettext. When use for example gettext('input_string') it returns input_string. On our server and in MAMP everything is working fine. What could be the problem? I am running the project on Apache and PHP 7.0 (same as the server and MAMP)

The domain for locales is binded like this:

bindtextdomain('projectname', APPLICATION_PATH. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'locale');
textdomain('projectname');
bind_textdomain_codeset('projectname', 'UTF-8');

The path in the bindtextdomain is correct. The file structure is:

 - locale
   - en_US
     - LC_MESSAGES
       - projectname.mo
       - projectname.po
   - fr_FR
     - LC_MESSAGES
       - projectname.mo
       - projectname.po
   - nl_NL
     - LC_MESSAGES
       - projectname.mo
       - projectname.po
   - pt_PT
     - LC_MESSAGES
       - projectname.mo
       - projectname.po

Solution

The locale wasn't installed on Homestead. Fixed it by using sudo locale-gen nl_NL