Web Development Recipes, 2nd Edition

Recipe 39

Setting Up a Virtual Machine

Problem

We want to test PHP scripts and configurations on a local server that looks like our production server. We need to set up an environment in which it’s safe to experiment.

Ingredients

• VirtualBox^[121]

• Ubuntu Server LTS image^[122]

Solution

We can use virtualization and open-source tools to create a server playground that runs on our laptop or workstation. We’ll use the free VirtualBox software and the Ubuntu Server Linux distribution to build this environment, and we’ll then set up the Apache web server with PHP so we can use this environment to test some PHP web projects.

Creating Our Virtual Machine

We need to grab two pieces of software: the Ubuntu server operating system and VirtualBox, an open-source ...