Justin Carmony has shared his success story about the use of Vagarant and PHP as a platform to make setting up and configuring developers' environments simple.

Now-a-days, you have frameworks that need to be setup [as a part of your environment], include paths that need to be changed, modules that need to be installed, web servers that need to be configured for your routing, etc. Then you might not just have MySQL, but Redis, Mongo, Couch, Memcached, Postgres, or any other dozen other servers. Then in Production you might have load balancers, multiple web servers, clusters of databases, and the list goes on. Simply put: web development environments are complex.

He introduces Vagrant and talks a bit about how it helped them with the setup and configuration of two new remote developers they had limited contact with. After some initial quirks, Vagrant made it simple for them to get up and running with new environments in a day.

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 this latest post to his blog Ben Ramsey shows you how to, inside of a virtual machine, set up a server with PHP 5.4 installed (using CentOS 6.2).

In case you haven't heard the news, the PHP project released version 5.4.0 last Thursday. Naturally, I decided it was time to install and give it a try. I chose to install to a clean and bare-bones CentOS 6.2 virtual machine using VirtualBox. I did this for two reasons: 1) I wanted a clean environment for the build, and 2) I wanted to play with CentOS. At the time of this writing, there are not yet any official CentOS RPMs for PHP 5.4, so I had to build PHP from source. What follows are the notes I took during the installation and build process. I hope you find them helpful.

His instructions cover the full process:

• Installing the CentOS operating system
• Creating a non-root user
• Setting up the network for local access
• Installing the packages for PHP (via yum)
• Grab PHP 5.4 and compile it
• Testing out the web server with a sample phpinfo file

He includes a lot of extensions in his installation, some you may not need like pspell, tidy, calendar, ftp or xsl.

For those fans of virtualization (and running VMs for development) you're not stranger to VirtualBox. Over on the Google Code site, there's a project that wants to make it easier to work with your VirtualBox instances via a PHP-driven interface.

An open source, AJAX implementation of the VirtualBox user interface written in PHP. As a modern web interface, it allows you to access and control remote VirtualBox instances. Much of its verbage and some of its code is based on the (inactive) vboxweb project. phpVirtualBox was designed to allow users to administer VirtualBox in a headless environment - mirroring the VirtualBox GUI through its web interface.

The tool isn't designed to be a management tool for a "hosting" type of environment, but rather to help you admin all of your VMs at once (no "ownership"). It uses the SOAP service (vboxwebsrv) that comes with VirtualBox servers to create a clean interface.

Improving on his last post about creating a bytecode compiler in PHP, the Sankuru blog has a new post in the series looking at extending the basic compiler to add support for if/while and do while logic.

In order to obtain a turing-complete programming language, that is, a language in which we can implement and execute any arbitrary algorithm, that is, that other turing-complete machines can execute too, we now need to add a way of (conditionally) branching, that is, the IF statement, and at least one way of repeating statements, that is the WHILE or the DO WHILE statements.

He includes a simple TL-based script as an end goal for the compiler to be able to execute and shows how to add rules for it to the lexer/parser. Rules for the "if" are relatively simple, but there's a hitch in dealing with embedded "while" statements he had to work around. The post ends with the bytecode results for the sample program and the resulting output from the compiled versions execution.

On the Sankuru blog there's a recent post looking at the construction of a simple bytecode compiler with a virtual machine as written in PHP (for Expression Language).

In my previous blog posts, I demonstrated how we can use the builtin PCRE library, to create a lexer in Php. I also showed how to use Bison-generated LALR1 parser tables in Php. In this blog post, I will re-use these lexing and parsing facilities to compile EL programs from within Php.

He uses his lexer/parser (available for download) in an example program that outputs some values and does some simple mathematical operations. There's sections detailing the Bison grammar used, execution stacks, callbacks and the bytecode it produces.

On DZone.com Giorgio Sironi has a new post talking about a development practice that's becoming more and more popular (rather than the old standby of one development platform for all developers) - using virtual machines as reusable, easily renewable platforms. He talks about the process he went through to set up PHP, including the commands used during the process.

This is an occasion to learn about a virtualization tool which I'm not familiar with, VirtualBox. The goal is to install PHP 5.4, which is not yet a stable release, to play around with new features such as traits without ruining the setup on my primary machine (which runs the super-stable PHP 5.3). Although it may be possible to run them together (I'm not a sysadmin), it's really simpler to install one of them in a virtual machine that can be thrown away if something goes wrong.

Using VirtualBox he describes the process of getting a Ubuntu system up and running including a custom compile of PHP with things like curl, bz2, mbstring and openssl support. With that installed and the Apache packages all set up, it should just be a matter of hitting your localhost's web server. If you're looking for older (or just other) versions of PHP to compile, check out the Historical Releases page on the PHP.net site.

SitePoint's PHPMaster has a new post today, the third part of a series helping you get your application from "zero to cloud" on an Amazon EC2 setup. In this latest post they wrap things up by showing how to set up the full lamp stack on the remote server. Here's part one and two that lead up to this latest part.

This is the final article in a three part series focused on setting up EC2 as a sandbox for application developers. I assume you have an AWS account with Amazon; if you don't, please read Part 1 to learn how easy it is to sign up. I also assume you have configured your development environment and installed an AMI; if you haven't, please read Part 2. In this installment, we'll learn how to install Apache, MySQL and PHP in our running AMI, and then clone the AMI to make our own.

Included in the post are all the commands you'll need to get the packages installed for PHP, MySQL, Apache 2, PEAR and the PHP command line binary. With all of that installed, they show you how to create an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) to make it easier to scale in the future.

On the Zend Developer Zone today Sam Hennessy has posted some information about how the IBM Power Systems can help you and your PHP application both perform better and do it for less.

If you're from the LAMP world, the concept of vertically scaling with a system like the i5 (IBM Power Systems) will be a complete revelation. If you follow the vertical scaling methodology, when it comes time to design how your application will scale, there is nothing for you to do.

With the i5 series all of the software runs locally and can be optimized for the best performance ("reduced complexity"). Virtual machines on the same physical machine make it quick and easy to create separate environments (like QA or staging). The system does a lot of the common maintenance tasks itself and could require less attention from the IT admins. You can find out more information about these machines from the IBM website.

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.