On the SitePoint PHP blog Bruno Skvorc has a new tutorial showing you how to get started with PHP and Nitrous.io, a service letting you create virtual "boxes" for your development. The tutorial helps you get started with their recently announced PHP support.

On February 12th, Nitrous.IO, the cloud development environment that lets you set up virtual boxes in a flash and use them from whichever platform through their Web IDE, finally added PHP support – something users have been clamoring for. You can read more about it in the announcement, but I figure it’s best if we demo by example and get a Laravel app up and running.

He helps you get up and running with an account on Nitrous.io first then includes some screenshots showing how to create a new box. He includes instructions on how to get some basic information about the environment. He helps you install the Zip library Composer needs to work correctly and helps set up a new VirtualHost for the Laravel site. Finally, he includes all the commands you'll need to get Composer installed and the Laravel instance up and running. There's a quick bit at the end showing how to hook the application into a MySQL database too.