On NetTuts.com today Gabriel Manricks walks you through setting up a staging environment using Vagrant to install and setup a virtual machine running Apache 2 and PHP 5.4.

Creating a staging environment is specific to your production environment. There is no magic solution that works in every situation. But most cases follow a similar pattern, and I'll cover all the key points as we go along. It's fair to assume that most people deploy their apps with some kind of versioning tool (like GIT). [...] Besides GIT, you have to think about the languages, software, and "special" features your production servers offer.

All of the commands and configuration files you'll need to make the automatic setup work are included in the article. It's based on a Debian (Squeeze) base image and uses packages to install the needed software. They also install other PHP extensions like mycrypt, GD, curl, APC and database support (MySQL, SQLite and Postgres). They help you get Apache set up to serve the application and work with git and its hooks to push the code and run Composer.