According to this new article on the Softpedia site, Debian and several other major Linux distributions will soon be making the move up to PHP 7 for their releases, the latest major version of the PHP language.

The Debian developers have publicly announced their plans to migrate all of the PHP 5 to the brand new and powerful PHP 7 release, as well as to change the PHP packaging to allow co-installable versions.

The announcement was made by Debian developer Ond?ej Surý a few couple of days ago on one of Debian Project's mailing lists, where he informs Debian devs about the changes made to the PHP packaging for the operating system, in the pkg-php packaging group.

In fact, PHP 7 has already made it to the unstable releases of the Debian linux distribution for those that would like to test things out. You can find out more of the specifics in this mailing list post on their implementation plans.

Dan Barrett has written up an excellent guide to setting up a LAMP stack on Debian from the ground up. It includes all the commands, configuration changes and screenshots of the interface you'll need.

Setting up a test environment can be a tricky thing when you compile PHP from scratch. As others have mentioned in the past, installations from Aptitude (and the like) lag behind which can quickly put your test environment out of date. Pulling inspiration from Juan Treminio and Brandon Savage, who both wrote excellent articles on setting up PHP from scratch. I like to keep my options open when developing which left both of those articles lacking a few features and extensions that I’d like to have bundled with PHP.

He guides you through a (detailed) process to get the following set up and running:

• Debian itself (GUI installer)
• Network configuration
• Installation of Apache
• both PostgreSQL and MySQL
• Other software including ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick
• PHP 5.5 (with several extensions of its own)

Hasin Hayder has posted a complete guide to getting Gearman and PHP playing nicely together. The guide gives you a step by step (and command by command) list to follow so you don't have the same pains he did trying to get it working.

I had a pretty rough evening today. No, not because the waiter forgot to add sugar in my tea, but because it was so boring to go through the trial and errors of installing gearman daemon and pecl gearman extension for php.

He walks though the whole process, starting with the failures, that he took getting it installed. Unfortunately it wasn't just as easy as installing a package and using PECL to drop in the extension. There was other software packages that needed to be installed as well and were a bit harder to figure out - libboost, gperf, libevent, uuid-dev and libcloog-ppl-dev. With these installed, the PECL install command was finally able to build and he got the shared module he needed.

On the BinaryTides.com site today there's a tutorial they've posted walking you through the full install process to get Nginx, PHP-FPM (with APC) and MariaDb working together on Debian, complete with configuration changes and all the commands you'll need.

Debian is a great choice for setting up linux webservers. According to current stats it is the most popular server OS followed closely by centos. I am a great fan of the apt/dpkg/gdebi commands, which make it so easy to install and update packages on the system. To setup a complete functional php webserver, you need to install a couple of extra things which include a webserver and a database. In this post we shall be setting up nginx, php, php-fpm, apc and maridb.

The tutorial is broken up into three main steps, each with clarification of what's involved:

• Install Nginx on Debian
• Install php and php-fpm
• Install MariaDB on Debian

In this new post Juan Terminio shows you how to set up a new virtual machine (VM) that hosts a Debian system (replacing the setup of his previous tutorial for setup of a Ubuntu system) in VirutalBox.

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).

In a new post to his blog Joshua Thijssen gives a guide to how he usually sets up his development environments when working in PHP. It includes working with virtual machines, configuring DNS and setting up his tools to work with it all.

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.

Andrew Johnstone came across an interesting problem when he tried to use memcached multigets with a large number of keys - it was throwing failures, but only when he tried it on Ubuntu.

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().

On the PHPFreaks.com site there's a new post that's a guide for creating a basic development environment on a Debian system (complete with VirtualHosts).

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.

Alex Netkachov has posted a new tutorial to his blog today about installing a custom LAMP setup (Linux - Debian, to be exact, Apache, MySQL and PHP) inside of a virtual machine.

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.

Stefan Koopmanschap has taken his own look at the latest offering from Zend - the Zend Server.

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.