Setting up a (web) development environment

Question

Hi, I would like to know how I can improve my development environment.

At the moment:

• I'm using Netbeans as my IDE.
• My local Dev server runs on a RHEL5 VirtualMachine similar to my production server.
• My Netbeans project is editing the VM files via ssh (I have mounted the server as a local drive)

But:

• It's slow
• Files can disapear ( netbeans delete them ? )
• I can't use git on it because it's slow.

The idea would be to be able to have a shared filesytem between the guest os and the host os.

Answer 1

Your setup sounds ok. You might need to give your virtual machine more resources however if your experiencing speed problems. That or move your server to a separate physical machine.

Answer 2

I find XAMPP sufficient for nearly all development locally :)

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Answer 3

It depends on the type Virtual Machine you're running. For example Vmware is able to share a specific folder between the guest and the host OS

Answer 4

You may try a setup for files the other way around. Keep your files an the host machine in the shared folder. Than on your VM create a symbolic link from your htdocs folder to that shared folder. In this case developing should be very fast but only running the website on your VM might be slower.

EDIT: My setup is the following:

• I got a XAMPP running on Windows 7 for development
• I got a SVN repository on the webserver the production system is runnig
• In a separate subdomain on my webserver I have a test system running

So basically I develop under Windows, I test on the same machine that runs my production system. We even got Macs for developing as well. I never had any issues developing under Windows and running the page on a openSUSE system (beside case-sensitive file names). Using the exact same machine for the test server is a good idea as it has the same limitations as the production server. So I think having three system DEVELOPMENT, TEST, PRODUCTION is the best you can get. But if it is only for some smaller projects your setup look quite good.