In his previous post Allan MacGregor introduced the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) and some of the functionality it offers. In this second part of the series sharing some "first steps" towards getting it running.

On a previous post "Introduction to HHVM" has no title attribute. we went over HHVM its history and the potential of running our PHP applications on top of it. Currently a few applications are fully supported like wordpress and drupal; more complex applications like Magento are still not 100% with HHVM due to bugs in the HHVM implementation. The first thing that we need to in order to start developing with HHVM is to setup a proper environment, for this case we are going to use a Vagrant Box.

He shows the steps to follow to get Vagrant up and working on your system (assuming you already have VirtualBox installed) and a base Ubuntu instance installed. Once its created and configured, then you can ssh into it and use apt-get to install all needed packages. There's a little bit of work you'll need to do to get ready for compiling the HHVM, but then you can clone the repository and run the build.