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?

Downloading and unpacking

Creating the virtual machine instance

Login and configuration

Installing drush

Take a snapshot and stop the virtual machine

Set up Drupal Instances with Drush and Virtual Hosts, not Bitnami Drupal modules

VirtualBox guest additions are cool to install, now Windows XP instance running seamlessly with Ubuntu

VirtualBox on Ubuntu

For some time now I have been running Windows XP inside Sun’s VirtualBox on top of my Ubuntu 8.04 OS on my Dell Inspiron 1420N.

Since writing this a new version of VirtualBox, 2.1.2, has come out, you probably want to use that instead (see http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads ). It’s just that mine works.

Installation was relatively painless. I downloaded the package straight from the VirtualBox site instead of from the apt-get version, which seems to be the best bet immediately, and basically followed all the instructions here:

http://www.howtoforge.com/virtualbox_ubuntu