Building a killer PHP/Drupal dev environment

Building a killer PHP/Drupal dev environment

Submitted by Jitesh Doshi on Fri, 01/18/2013 - 22:53

I had the pleasure of giving a presentation at the last Jacksonville Drupal Meetup - Building a killer PHP/Drupal dev environment.

Building a local environment for beginners and more advanced high performance environments:

Here's what I covered:

  • Web server: Nginx instead of Apache
  • Database server: MariaDB instead of MySQL
  • Installing WPN-XM package that includes most of the above.
  • IDE - either Eclipse or NetBeans
  • Database client - HeidiSQL instead of MySQL-Admin
  • Command shell - Git Bash instead of Putty, because you need to SSH, but you also need to work locally.
  • Settings up XDebug for interactive debugging
  • Using SSH tunnel for remote database session as well as PHP debugging session
  • Setting up VMs with VirtualBox and TurnkeyLinux
  • ... and more ...

We followed two very different approaches - one native stack (WPN-XM in case of Windows) and the other based on a VM running Linux, nginx etc. We spent half of our time on each of the two approaches.

We had a laptop running both the approaches side-by-side. Follow the links above to download and configure the software used.

Jitesh Doshi

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Managing Partner & CTO
  • A seasoned technology entrepreneur and enthusiast
  • A regular speaker at industry conferences and universities
  • Host and organizer of technology user groups
  • Active in management of non-profit organizations serving the local community
  • Leader and contributor for multiple open-source projects
  • Expert in cloud, application integration, web and mobile technologies
  • Author of open-source projects, including on Drupal.org - Popular Tags and PRLP.
  • Developed several highly successful software platforms and frameworks for clients