Set up a Virtual Machine as developer environment

Preparation

As I have already mentioned, for more complicated systems and to emulate the live environment it is suggested to use a separate virtual machine(s) with installed LAMP environment in it.

You will need a virtual machine software, my favorite is the OracleVM VirtualBox: it is lightweight, it has a big comminity and it is free.

We need to get a Linux distribution, since usually there is no need to have a GUI included, I suggest to download an ISO file of a Debian or Ubuntu Server. Further on I will make examples with Ubuntu 12.10.

Installation of Ubuntu

There are tons of descriptions for the topic available, so I would rather skip this.

Access Ubuntu via ssh

If you have not chosen the openssh package installation during the Ubuntu installation, you should do it now:

To install the OpenSSH client applications on your Ubuntu system, use this command at a terminal prompt:

 sudo apt-get install openssh-client  

To install the OpenSSH server application, and related support files, use this command at a terminal prompt:

 sudo apt-get install openssh-server  

You have to add a new network adapter to your virtual machine instance at the host application, choose a "Bridge" option from the "Attached to" dropbox, then in the installed Ubuntu set up the IP address of the adapter:

 nano /etc/network/interfaces  

 auto eth1  
 iface eth1 inet static  
 address 192.168.56.10 # this is the IP address of your guest os  
 netmask 255.255.255.0  

And you should enable it:

  sudo ifup eth1  

If you have done everything fine, you should be able to ssh into you guest OS via ssh client.

Installing Nginx

The Nginx is available as a package, so it can be installed in the following way:

 sudo apt-get install nginx  

Afterwards you need to start it:

 sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start  

If you have no issues during the installation you should see the following screen on load of the http://ubuntu-vm

Installing PHP5

In Ubuntu you can make PHP5 work in Nginx through PHP-FPM, which is a daemon process (with the init script /etc/init.d/php5-fpm) that runs a FastCGI server set by default on port 9000.

 apt-get install php5-fpm  

Set up the Nginx virtualhost

Create a folder for your new virtualhosted application here:

 mkdir /var/www/localhost  

Create a config for the new host:

 sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/localhost  

 server {  
     listen  80; ## listen for ipv4; this line is default and implied  
     #listen  [::]:80 default ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6  
     root /var/www/localhost;  
     index index.php index.html index.htm;  
     # Make site accessible from http://ubuntu_localhost/  
     server_name ubuntu_localhost;  
     location / {  
         try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;  
     }  
     # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000  
     #  
     location ~ \.php$ {  
         #try_files $uri =404;  
         fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;  
         fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;  
         fastcgi_index index.php;  
         include fastcgi_params;  
     }  
 }  

Set up your Windows hosts file accordingly :

 192.168.1.10     ubuntu_localhost  

Create a symlink to it in the sites-enabled directory:

 sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/localhost /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/localhost  

Restart nginx:

 sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart  

Create an index.php file in the newly created /var/www/localhost folder with the following content:

 <?php   
 phpinfo();
  

If you have set up everything properly, you should see the phpinfo() page upon loading the http://ubuntu_localhost/

Set up Samba

Here you can find a pretty nice guide how to set up a samba share between the host Windows 7 and guest Ubuntu 12.