Previously, I created a tutorial on installing a 32-bit Ubuntu VM with PHP 5.3.x. I've since moved on to PHP 5.4.x and Debian, which is universally considered a safer bet for a server OS. This tutorial is what I will point back to in the future when I want to show people how to create a VM, so you should consider the Ubuntu-based tutorial obsolete. In reality, Ubuntu is based on Debian, so the bulk of this tutorial will be very similar to the Ubuntu one, albeit with some minor changes here and there.

He starts with a few reasons to use a VM over the more traditional single development system mentality including keeping the "server" off your desktop and the dev-to-production similarity needs. He shows how to use the VirtualBox software and a Debian ISO to create the VM, complete with screenshots of each step of the way (for both host and guest OSes). He also helps you get a few things installed including sudo, setting up the network, configuring the hosts file and installing some common utilities as well as the MySQL, Apache, PHP and Samba combination (with PHP compiled from the 5.4.x source).

Doing development on multiple projects can be a burden from time to time. One project would be running on PHP 5.3, while another still needs 5.1. Sometimes you need a MySQL server, while on other occasions, you need a NoSQL solution like couchDB or MongoDB together with all kind of gearman functionality. This article shows you how I've setup such a development platform that allows you to quickly create new projects, and still maintain flexibility when you need it.

He uses VirtualBox with either a Debian or CentOS installation as a base platform. He uses Vagrant to set up and configure the machines to make setup almost automatic. He still has to go in and configure a few things like the VirtualHost and DNS settings for the site/application he's working on. Next up is setting up the tools he uses, specifically XDebug and setting up his editor of choice (PHPStorm) for remote debugging.

I Spent a little while yesterday investigating why memcached causes problems with multigets returning results and ended up comparing debian vs ubuntu. [...] A larger number of keys than 200 causes memcached to fail to return valid responses, additionally the key length greatly varies the number items you can pull back within a single multiget on Ubuntu, Debian implementation of memcached is able to handle all requests regardless of key length size.

He includes the code for his brief test and the output of the test runs on both Ubuntu and Debian systems. They clearly show the failures on the Ubunut side, with it throwing errors about "memcached_oi_read" and a zero length value returned to recv().

This is just a quick walkthrough describing how to setup a decent development environment allowing the easy setup of multiple sites. It already assumes you have a working Debian or Ubuntu OS installed and configured with PHP, MySql & Apache already running. You will also need to have a working sudo.

They add a group for the web server user (www), change some permissions on the web root directory and edit the base Apache2 "sites" file where the VirtualHosts live. They create a sample PHP file - a phpinfo page - in the directory and add a record to the local hosts file for the new domain. Commands for all of the above are included.

Installing Linux is not a complex task, you only need to follow some instructions and have basic understanding of how computer software and hardware work. Also you should be ready that documentation will be different from what you already might have seen. It means that it may be less colorful, more technical, and have different terminology. That's Ok. What you need is only to follow the doc and try to understand it - like thousands of people.

Most of the post is taken up with installing the Debian instance inside of a virtual instance (he mentions three, they're all about the same - VirtualBox, VMWare Server and VirtualPC) and includes a slideshow of images to help you through the install process. Once its installed, its just a simple matter of a few apt-get commands and you'll have MySQL and PHP setup to work with the already-installed Apache instance.

Zend released a new web application server product earlier this week called Zend Server. Curious as I am, I'm going to have a quick look into it here. I decided to start fresh so I launched my Parallels and installed a fresh Debian VM to check Zend Server out on. After running through the Debian installation I was ready to start the work.

He mentions a few of the "goods" - like the Debian package that's already built (just an apt-get call away), the nice interface and some of the bads - the "not quite enterprise" feel of the dashboard (looks a lot like Zend Platform) and a few smaller setup issues that could be easily fixed in future releases.

His overall impression is a bit indifferent, though he notes that

This is just a beta though, so things may change in the future. We'll see. [...] It's good to see something new coming from Zend, but I think they could've done better.

I was entasked recently with getting a continuous integration environment set up. phpUnderControl seems to be the tool of choice for this these days, so I started off in that direction. [...] Obviously I needed to install PHP itself. CruiseControl is a daemon written in Java, so that needed to be installed as well. Our Linux distro of choice is Debian. With these requirements, I set out.

He walks through the process - downloading the Debian ISO and installing in a VM, installing the needed packages, setting up the correct environment and getting everything started up and running. The end result is a local CruiseControl server with PHP integration, a web interface and plenty of configuration options you can customize for your needs.

Suhosin is a great and simple way of increasing your security without having a large impact on overall performance. In this tutorial I will cover the installation and configuration of Suhosin on both debian etch and centos 5. I may cover mod_security in a later tutorial.

They apt-get the packages needed for the patch in examples for two different distributions - Debian (etch) and CentOS. They also show how to set up some basic configuration to get the patch installed and working with your PHP installation.

Since a few days, there is a new package in Debian: php5-xdebug. After a few years of talking licenses, due to the help of Martin Meredith and Francois Marier Xdebug can finally be installed with apt-get.

XDebug is a debugging and profiling tool that adds additional information (more than just the usual "error on line..." sort of thing) to the output of your PHP scripts. It also adds more complex functionality like profiling and code coverage reports run on your applications.

This week I started to setup a Debian-based (Etch) web-server with PHP 5.2 in a virtual-machine with VMWare. Part of this setup was getting XDebug2 integrated. It's really awesome and my students definitely need to learn about it. [...] Building went well as usual but when I tried to integrate the extension inside php.ini it was all weird.

His system kept throwing him an error when he tried to load the shared module using the zend_extension directive, hand things happened. Loading it normally worked (so he knew it wasn't the module) and he finally figured out the problem:

But I need to enable it as Zend extension. Whatever. I finally used the full path to xdebug.so to load it [...] that worked.