A few days ago I shared my experience in setting up Bitnami LAMP Virtual Machine Stack using VirtualBox for Drupal development on my MacBook Air. That article serves well for the initial setup with the latest version of VirtualBox. Now, a few days later, I would like to share “what I really had to do” to get comfy with this local laptop/workstation development environment, the actual steps necessary for acquiring a truly useful tool.
Short List (“back to work”)
- Obtain IP of running Bitnami Guest unless you are using static IP (recommended)
- Fix Local IP in /etc/hosts and login with terminal
- Mount codebase via sshfs and work with IDE, Atom, Sublime, etc. or else use Eclipse remoting.
Long List (“Let’s get a Drupal project up and running and get back to work already”)
- Static address
- Set hostname and server names on Guest if not using Static address
- Fix Local IP in /etc/hosts/ and login with terminal
- Make sure terminal is bash and not dash
- Checkout codebase
- Set files permissions and refresh files via rsync
- Create database via http://phpmyadmin.bitnamilampvm
- Refresh db via rsync if not included in codebase and load local db
- Setup local /etc/hosts, in the Guest vm setup the virtual hosts, and restart apache
- Run in browser
- Mount codebase via sshfs and work with IDE, Atom, Sublime, etc. or else use Eclipse remoting
Bitnami LAMP Virtual Machine Stack using VirtualBox for Drupal development
Work Local with your favorite editor or IDE! Then deploy wherever
I have previously written about the great Kalabox dev environment which is especially useful in the development process if you are using Pantheon hosting. When you install that, you automatically get VirtualBox installed.
Using VirtualBox you can work with other cool virtual machine images, like Bitnami, for example. In this article we learn how to setup a no-nonsesense Lamp virtual machine using the Bitnami LAMP Stack Virtual Appliance riding on VirtualBox, with no-nonsense virtual host based Drupal instances accessible anywhere on your network, and you can use a best-practices based process workflow with an Ubuntu server running right on your Windows, Mac or Linux laptop.
Quo vadis? Native Installer or Virtual Machine?
Creating the virtual machine instance
Take a snapshot and stop the virtual machine
Set up Drupal Instances with Drush and Virtual Hosts, not Bitnami Drupal modules