Saturday, September 12, 2015

Set up a LAMP server for Web Development - Intro

What is this about?

A lot of people like to learn more about Web development. But not everyone has access to a web server. And let's face it, having your own web server running on your laptop is nice, isn't it? What more is that you are also learning to manage a Linux/Ubuntu server. Double bonus!!!!

Today I will talk about setting up a LAMP (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP) environment running as a virtual machine on your laptop. Since I have a MacBook Pro, this article will focus on the MacBook. The same procedure works for MacBook Air too.
There are a number of virtualization products you can use on a Mac. My favorites are VMWare Fusion from VMWare, and VirtualBox from Oracle. Since VirtualBox is FREE, we will be using VirtualBox in this article.

What do you need?

  • A laptop, obviously. Any laptop with multiple cores CPU and at least 4G bytes of memory would works. The LAMP server, surprisingly, does not need a lot of memory to run. 512M or even 256M is enough for a server without GUI. I am using a mid-2012 MacBook Pro with i7 and 16G. It is way overkill and not necessary. I also have a 11" Macbook Air with 4G mem and it is working fine.
  • A Virtualization software such as VirtualBox, or VMWare
  • Ubuntu 32-bit or 64-bit server software in ISO format

In the next blog post, I'll go through the steps that I put these thing together.

No comments:

Post a Comment