As the first part of a series, Tom Jowitt has posted this introduction to setting up a brand new development environment with some of the basic tools any PHP developer should need.

I dunno about anyone else but my development environment is usually in some form of barely-controlled chaos. It's one command away from collapse with folders full of test software, symlinks that lead to long-forgotten libraries and ancient VCS repos that only a mother could love, all held together with sticky-tape shell scripts. [...] This series of posts will look at the tools available to PHP developers who want to be liberated from the mundane and the frustrating tasks that plague our lives.

He doesn't describe the installation of the basic platform - Apache, PHP and MySQL on Ubuntu - but jumps right into the details of the settings. He shows how to:

• configure the VirtualHosts in Apache,
• installing and updating PEAR,
• Install/configure XDebug,
• Set up PHPUnit,
• and install git for version control

In the next post he'll show how to set up Phing for building/testing out the code.