Create your perfect virtualised PHP development environment
The development environment is one of the most important factors to be taken into consideration for successful projects. The environment has three basic elements: the operating system, the text editor and the test environment. The operating system is not really important as long as you’re used to it, and this also applies to the text editor. The test environment is something else, because you want to avoid “surprises” when your code goes on the production or company test environment.
Your test environment should be very similar, if not identical to the production environment. Unfortunately a lot of organizations have rules that stop you from having your perfect environment. Sometimes requiring a different environment (such as Windows / Mac OS) than your production (such as Linux)
How are you supposed to have a PHP test environment under Windows / Mac OS that is similar to your production Linux? The answer is quite simple: virtualisation. You can have a Linux virtual machine that runs your test environment, and the best part is that you have total control of the test environment, with root access.
“Read more about this topic at Bogdan Albei’s blog.”:http://bogdan-albei.blogspot.com/2009/05/create-your-perfect-virtualised-php.html
3 comments to “Create your perfect virtualised PHP development environment”
May 7th, 2009 at 12:25 am
I’ve been developing this way for over a year now. I would recommend it to most people.
May 7th, 2009 at 8:15 am
is what i use and it runs very smoothly and fast.
The only advantage you have with VMWare, when installed on a server, you can access it anywhere, for the cost of comfort.
May 7th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Most of my PHP sources are published on our own servers so there is rarely a need for simulating my "ideal" environment as our servers provide root access. A big topic where virtualization fits nicely is when it comes to front-end testing in different browsers. Almost all the time I am developing under Linux and Windows still beats Wine in running Internet Explorer. Virtualization makes development a lot easier in many areas.