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.

Chris Hartjes is asking for suggestions to help solve a common problem for developers (remote or otherwise) that have to develop in a non-local setup: a better method for remote code development.

I've been playing around with Sublime Text (because of the awesome vim bindings) and was thinking about why do I always have to be logged into the remote server to do my work. Normally I connect using SSH, then attach to my tmux session and then fire up vim. This is okay but it lacks a certain elegance in it's approach. [...] What I'm chafing against is having to deal with multiple environments all the time to get my work done.

His ultimate goal is to be able to update and commit code without having to be logged into the remote server - essentially to replicate the local development experience regardless of the underlying technology. Have a suggestion or a method that's currently working for you? Leave him a comment!

These days there's much more involved in making a good, solid web application than just the platform you serve from. Joshua Thijssen knows this and humorously points it out in a new post about a "LAMPGMVNMCSTRAH-stack" (that's fifteen different technologies for those counting).

Back in the good old days - and in internet-time, this actually means just a few years ago - people were quite happy with their LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. With this quartet, or a variation on it like PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, we could do everything: create a blog-site, setup an e-commerce web shop, making a guestbook, you name it and it was there.. But times have changed... radically.

He talks about this "brave new world" developers live in today where they can't know everything that happens in every facet of the application (he likens it to the responsibilities of generals vs infantry in the army).

As a programmer, you simply cannot pretend that you and you alone are running a system. You are part of a whole, and even though you might be the most important part, or the controlling part, you still need to work with other components in order to get the job done. If you forget this, no matter how good your part is running, the whole system will fail because you either decided to do too much yourself, or did not correctly utilize the rest of the system.

Wondering what his acronym stands for? LAMPGMVNMCSTRAH is short for "Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Gearman, Memcached, Varnish, Ngnix, MongoDB, CouchDB, Solr, Tika, Redit, ActiveMQ, Hadoop."

Tom Jowitt has posted his third part in his "streamlined PHP development" series today focusing on working with databases and setting it up with your automated deployment system (parts one and two).

In the first two parts of this series we covered setting up the server and an introduction to Phing. This post will cover managing our database code with dbdeploy and Phing.

He points out that there's no "silver bullet" when it comes to automated database management but he's found dbdeploy as a good tool for his needs. He includes the configuration changes to get the database login information into Phing and a few new targets/tasks to add to the Phing configuration for initializing the database and applying patches.

Pim Elshoff has a recent post to his blog looking at a "kickass development environment" he's gotten working on Windows that includes PEAR, some type of version control (git or svn - take your pick), Ant for builds and Jenkins for continuous integration.

Recently I have become quite interested in quality assurance. Not that many things are going wrong for me, but I'd really like to be more certain about the quality of my work. I've used some tools to help me achieve just that. In less than two hours you can set up your workspace and have the living daylights automated out of you!

He provides a full guide to getting the full stack set up including the command-line calls you'll need to make, creating a new build file for Ant and setting up the PHP tools (like Phpmd, DocBlox and Pdepend). In the end, you should see something similar to this setup in your Jenkins build.

Rob Allen has posted his own guide to getting PHP 5.3 set up on OS X 10.7 Lion, the just-released update for Apple's operating system. It comes with a bundled set of PHP-related tools but you might want to set them up your own way. This is where the guide comes in.

With OS X 10.7, Apple continues to ship PHP 5.3 with PEAR, GD and PDO_MYSQL out of the box. This is how to set it up from a clean install of 10.7.

He goes through each of the pieces of software and talks about where to download the latest from and what configuration steps are needed:

• MySQL
• Apache
• the php.ini
• Xdebug
• PEAR
• PHPUnit (and friends)
• PECL OAuth
• mcrypt

Tom Jowitt has posted the second part of his series looking at setting up a streamlined PHP development environment in part two covering some of the basics of the build.

In the first part of this series we looked at setting up our Apache installation to make life easier. Now that the basics are sorted we can start looking at how to structure our development environment and run some basic build tasks using Phing.

He shows how to use the PEAR installer to get Phing installed (including all of its dependencies) and creating the base directory for it to use in your build. He includes the contents of some of the configuration files (available on github) to set up some properties and the steps to the build process in the build.xml. He explains each part of the build process and includes some screenshots of the end result.

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.

On the IBM developerWorks site today there's a new tutorial from Daniel Krook showing you how to use the IBM Cloud product to set up a development environment based on a Red Hat Enterprise server distribution with Zend Server as the PHP environment.

This article explains what makes cloud computing appealing to PHP developers and provides step-by-step instructions how to use the IBM Cloud to set up a PHP and DB2 development environment quickly. Learn how to provision Linux data and web application servers, connect to the virtual machines via SSH, use X Forwarding to install a pre-configured PHP distribution, and test your connection to DB2.

He starts with some benefits that the IBM Cloud can bring to developers and lists a few common goals that they look for in their development platforms. The rest of the post walks you through the setup and install of a sample instance - adding and configuring it, connecting via an SSH connection and installing Zend Server to give you a simple, hassle-free installation of a PHP environment.

In a quick new post to his blog today Brian Swan shows you how to find a drive letter in Azure through PHP (for a Windows Azure Drive).

Today, I'll start by taking a look at Windows Azure Drives. Specifically, I'll explain how to programmatically determine the driver letter for a Windows Azure Drive. (I'll assume you've read the getting started post I wrote a couple of weeks ago.) Simply put, a Windows Azure drive acts as a local NTFS volume that is mounted on the server's file system and that is accessible to code running in a role. The data written to a Windows Azure drive is stored in a page blob defined within the Windows Azure Blob service, and cached on the local file system.

He shows how he's set up his instance with two drives and how, with a bit of PHP code, he could grab the value from the "X_DRIVES" environment variable, split it out and loop to find the drive you're looking for. His example code puts a simple text file on the drive and then reads it back out.