The Vegatbit.com site has posted a tutorial today showing you how to build a link sharing site with Laravel, a simple application that lets you create "shortlinks" to make it easier to pass along URLs to others.

Building your own applications, even on a simple or small scale, is a great way to build your skills. This Link Sharing Website tutorial using Laravel will help us to to just that. If you’d like to save yourself a little time, you could just as easily head on over to http://www.easylaravelbook.com/ and pick up a great pre written application, PHPLeaks. PHPLeaks is a Link Sharing Website that has everything you need to get a nice starter project going.

They walk you through every step of the process, showing you all the code and commands you'll need to get the application, database and frontend set up and running. This even includes the installation of the Homestead virtual machine and configuration of your local machine. Don't be intimidated by the long list of steps - it's pretty quick thanks to several of the Laravel artisan commands.

The 7PHP.com site has a tutorial they've recently posted showing you how to get Magnto 2 installed on an AWS instance running LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL and PHP).

This article tries to demonstrate how to setup an AWS (EC2) instance, installing a LEMP stack, preparing the server environment to meet Magento’s requirements and then to finally install Magento v2 using command line approach. [...] I’m presenting in this article something which might otherwise seem to be a daunting approach – but I also see it as an approach which you can later automate by using Docker/Dockerfile for example or even using a Vagrant appliance.

He takes you through the entire process, including the setup of the account and instance on the AWS side, with screenshots along the way:

• Creating a Free Tier AWS Account
• Preparing & Configuring your AWS EC2 Instance
• Creating A Security Group For Our AWS EC2 Instance
• Creating a PEM file – Key Pairs
• Creating our AWS EC2 Instance
• Creating an Elastic IP & Assigning to our EC2 Instance
• Preparing & Configuring our AWS EC2 Instance
• Installing Our LEMP Stack
• The Magento 2 Project Installation Walkthrough
• Configuring nginx conf file to serve our magento site
• Creating a database & running The Magento Setup From Commandline

You'll find all the commands, screenshots and output examples you'll need to follow along with the tutorial easily. There's also links to other resources if you're interested in finding out more about the setup.

For those interested in getting started with the CodeIgniter framework, but want a more step-by-step guide to getting it up and running, this recent post from Mayank Kandpal can help.

Every other day, I develop new websites from scratch for various clients and sometimes for some of my own projects. Unless the project is really complex, I prefer to develop in CodeIgniter, a super-flexible (MVC) PHP framework which lets me develop super-quick !

He walks you through all the steps you'll need - from downloading the latest to creating the application and things like setting up logging and authentication.

Bogdan Albei has a new post today looking at a development environment he's set up and considers one of the "perfect" ways to do it - a virtualized environment that lets you test in your deployment environment despite what OS you currently run.

he environment has three basic elements: the operating system, the text editor and the test environment. The operating system is not really important as long as you're used to it, and this also applies to the text editor. [...] Unfortunately a lot of organisations have rules over rules that stop you from having your perfect environment. [...] How are you supposed to have a PHP test environment under Windows/MaxOS that is similar to your production Linux? The answer is quite simple: virtualisation.

He suggests using VMware to create a virtual environment (or multiple environments) for your development. They can even potentially share a folder on the drive so you can test the same code in multiple environments. He also includes a step-by-step guide that'll have you up and running in no time. Obviously, you'll need a copy of your OS of choice to install from once the VMware instance is all set up.