What are the essential things that a new ubuntu server should have installed, for development purposes?

Question

sudo apt-get install build-essential

What else?

Answer 1

For any sort of web development, I would recommend apache2. For databases, I would recommend mysql-server or postgresql. For Java (as well as C++ and some others), a popular option is eclipse, although netbeans is also good.

If you want to see what's going on under the hood, wireshark is a great network monitoring utility that shows you every detail of all network traffic for the server.

Answer 2

Ask the developer who's going to use it.