VirtualBox Ubuntu LAMP Stack development, with SVN and CruiseControl/phpUnderControl?

Question

I've got a Windows 7 machine upon which I do both PHP/MySql Dev, and .NET/C#/Sql Server coding. Due to a recent re-install, I thought it might be an ideal time to try and keep my machine a bit cleaner rather than install both Apache and IIS, etc.

I installed VirtualBox, with Ubuntu 10.04 as the guest OS, with the plan to move my PHP development from my old Windows/Apache/MySql platform onto this virtual image. In addition to this, I want to add CruiseControl/phpUnderControl to my PHP development process.

So far I've got Ubuntu 10.04 installed with a LAMP stack, plus Netbeans for PHP, MySQL Workbench, etc, which is effectively the same as my old Windows dev set up, but I've now also installed SVN and CruiseControl (I've not installed phpUnderControl yet, but that is the next step).

My question is, can I use this virtual image as both my "local" development environment and as a build server, so that I don't need to clutter my native windows machine with MySql/PHP related software (meaning I can keep it nice and clean for .NET development)?

I imagine I'd need the virtual webserver to be able to serve both a "local" dev version of any given project I'm working on, as well as a staging version, which would build using cruisecontrol/svn commits?

Or should I separate my dev and build servers, perhaps keep the local development in windows, and only use the virtual image for the build server? or perhaps have two separate virtual machines for different purposes?

I'd appreciate some advice on the best way to set this up. One of the projects I want to work on is quite complex so I want to make sure I get this up in the right way before I start the project, so that I can ensure the project is well maintained with versioning, unit tests and continuous integration, should I ever need to involve other developers on the project.

Answer 1

If you are considering having your VM for dev why not set it up exactly as you would setup your staging/production environment?

Furthermore you can setup your VM to host the code repository, and the web server, and then connect your tools that are local to your host machine (Windows). That way you can develop on your Windows box, connected to the VM.

This gives you the ability to do everything in your local environment while simulating the server environment in your VM.

VirtualBox does networking really well too, and you should be able to make your Windows host connect via the network to the server as if it were really another node on the network.

Answer 2

If you are looking to keep your Windows box clean of MySQL/PHP tools then I'd strongly recommend the two VM approach. One desktop linux distribution for development with LAMP etc on it for the quick code/debug turnaround and one that mirrors your real server install (with the addition of svn etc) for your test builds.

This gives you huge benefits for both having a nice dev environment and more importantly having a test server that will reflect operation of your code on the live server. This way you can keep your dev environment VM up to date with the latest updates for the distribution (kernel, tools, etc) and hold the build VM at whatever application versions are on the live machine. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of "is it the new version of library X or my code?".

If you want to go slightly overkill you'd actually want 3. One for dev, one for SVN/continuous integration and one that exactly mirrors your server so you can test deployment/system configuration.