Building a killer PHP/Drupal dev environment

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.