Juan Treminio has a recent post to his blog showing the complete steps you'll need to get a virtual machine up and running (using VirtualBox and a Ubuntu Seerver install), complete with PHP, MySQL, Samba and Apache.

Recently on r/php there was a thread asking users about their development environments. The usual answers came tumbling out - mostly about IDEs and methods for uploading their code (side note: FTP is a horrible way to do this!). Out of 144 responses, I noticed that very few mentioned virtual machines. Most that said anything about operating systems or platforms made it clear they were developing on their local machine, with no separation between their everyday driver and their development environment. This has got to stop, especially amongst PHP developers where we have tools like XAMPP that require nothing more than a simple zip extract to get up and running with your own "server".

He walks you through the entire process, complete with screenshots and commands ready for copy & paste, to get your virtual machine server set up and working. The PHP install includes things like cURL, memcache, internationalization, GD and MySQL support. He also helps you get other tools like XDebug and PHPUnit installed.

This is definitely one of the more complete examples I've see of getting a VM set up and ready for development - if you've been wanting to try it out, I'd recommend this guide.

In a new post to his blog Chris Hartjes shows you how to get PHP 5.4 installed on a CentOS machine (virtual machine) with the help of Vagrant.

I like the idea of using Vagrant to create virtual machines for my development work. Doing things this way I think keeps the host machine cleaner and allows you the ability to distribute those VM's to other people as well. My old boss Ben Ramsey did a very informative post on getting PHP 5.4 configured on CentOS so I decided to one-up him by taking his instructions and creating a Puppet manifest so you could do this using Vagrant or on any server that you can provision using Puppet.

He example is based off of the publiclly available Vagrant setup and provides the contents of the Vagrantfile that he uses to set up the machine. From there, Puppet takes over and uses his configuration (also included) to set up things like the Apache server, some configurations for it, a list of PHP extensions and, of course, PHP itself.

In this new post to his blog Matthew Turland shows how to set up a puppet configuration to deploy and set up an EC2 environment for Drupal.

I'm currently working on a project that involves running Drupal on Amazon EC2. To save time in setting up future new VM instances, I decided to take the opportunity to learn puppet. For the time being, I'm using a single VM to run the full LAMP stack and running puppet without a server by copying my puppet manifest to the VM and using puppet's apply command to apply it locally. However, this manifest can easily be adapted for a multi-VM environment.

He includes the full configuration in the post that does a few things including setting up the correct PHP timezone, starting up the Apache instance, installing a few PHP modules (like PDO, MySQL and GD) and setting up the MySQL server. He also includes the commands needed to run the configuration and point it at the correct EC2 instance.

On the Sankuru blog today the next post in the series about creating a compiler in PHP has been posted. In this latest tutorial he shows how to set up a plugin architecture for the compiler that allows you to quickly and easily extend it beyond its base functionality.

A plugin architecture allows multiple developers to work on the same application and let yet another person assemble their work later on. It allows the plugin developer to understand just his plugin API without having to understand all the details of the entire application.

He describes a few platforms that already have the concept of plugins including Joomla, Mediawiki and SugarCRM. He explains what a plugin architecture should be and what it shouldn't be. All of this is his first steps towards building a plugin-enabled compiler and virtual machine in PHP.

Juozas Kaziukenas has suggested an alternative to the usual "how to set up a web server" tutorials and methods for developer environment. He suggests that maybe virtual machine images are the way to go.

There are millions of articles on how to setup LAMP setup on your own machine to allow developing websites locally. I think this is a wrong approach as running server programs in one's computer creates a lot of potential problems. Better approach for this would be to use Virtual Machines as they allow bigger flexibility and fewer headaches when something goes wrong.

He talks about a few of the advantages to the approach and some of the performance gains you'd get from having your environment local like that. He points to VirtualBox as a good potential solution and some tips on working with the local server as if it was remote.

David Behler has provided a complete guide to helping you get a development virtual machine instance up and running quickly complete with Apache, PHP, MySQL and Samba shares to access your files.

I know that no server is like the other and you might still run into some problems due to different library versions and so on, but you gotta admit that two Linux servers have way more in common than a Linux and a Windows server. So in this post I'll tell you how to setup your own VM with all the libs you need. Even if you haven't worked with Linux before, you should be able to follow this tutorial/example easily.

He uses an image from thoughtpolice as the base and walks you through every step of the way. He shows you how to log in as root, update all packages and start installing the software you'll need (all via apt-get). There's even a sample Samba configuration file you can use to get started. The end result of all of this setup can be found in this image too.

Tony Bibbs has posted a new tutorial to the Oracle Technology Network website for all of the Oracle & Mac users out there - Installing PHP 5.2 for Oracle on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

If you've ever attended a PHP conference, you might have thought that Apple was a sponsor based on all the Mac laptops you saw. Many of the PHP developers toting Macs are running Linux as a virtual machine but more and more PHP developers work natively on the Mac. Recognizing this fact, Oracle has made it downright easy to develop PHP/Oracle applications on the Mac. In this guide I'll show just how easy it is to get your Mac setup to build Oracle-based PHP applications.

His method requires that you have access to a server already running Oracle (even the Express Edition will do), XCode and either Fink or MacPorts (optional). His setup is to use the Oracle installation inside of a virtual machine to get the needed libraries from to build PHP correctly. He even includes some screenshots of the Parallels installation of Kubuntu and some test code to ensure things are working as they should.