Setting up a development server

Question

When developing PHP applications, it\'s best to have a server you develop/test on, and then a live server you put everything once it\'s ready.

OK, but how?

If yo

Answer 1

You don't need to go anywhere near as far as asking a hosting company to setup two identical hosting environments for you. The majority of the time they have up to date versions of php, mysql and apache. I develop on a Linux machine, that has a lamp stack setup already, so my workflow is pretty seamless, and I use a svn with post-commit hooks to upload to the live server. If you are worried about incompatibilities between you're 'dev' server and the hosting server, the easiest thing to do is make a phpinfo file,

and check that your hosting server does not prohibit any special functions you use on your dev server (and this is pretty rare that the hosting company blocks vital things, and if they do you can easily send support an email and 99% of the time they will assist you in enabling whatever particulars you require. But as far as setting up your dev environment, I would go down the track of grabbing virtualbox, and installing ubuntu, find a tutorial for making ubuntu a web server (seriously only a few apt-get commands) and you will be smoking with gas !