Picking a distribution can be just as confusing as setting up the environment itself, I like Debian and we use it at work so if you are going to follow this guide, it will be easiest if you use Debian or a Debian based distribution (such as Ubuntu) – the rest of this guide will assume you picked Debian. Get yourself to and install the appropriate package for your operating system. Step 1: Download VirtualBox and an operating system That said, you can just as easily have the VirtualBox spin up when you login/boot-up your computer if you’re on a dedicated work box. I don’t really want to have a bunch of unnecessary software running when I’m not working. If you’re like me, your laptop is not only your work machine, but your TV watching, Facebook stalking, music playing, Skype calling all in one.

Convenience – by virtualising your development environment you isolate it from your day-to-day use of your computer.

Portability – through the GUI you can export virtual machines, which means you can back them up, and share them across machines – great for standardising your development environment in a team.

No matter what OS your computer is running, you have complete flexibility on what you install to your VirtualBox.

Consistency – perhaps most importantly you can mimic the environment that you are deploying to.

There are many benefits to working with a virtualised development environment over using your OS packages and installers (whether that be homebrew/macports on OS X or directly using package managers on whatever flavour of Linux you happen to be running) these include:

Step 5: Share your files with your VirtualBox.

Step 4: Configure Networking with VirtualBox.

Step 2: Install VirtualBox, with an operating system.

Step 1: Download VirtualBox and an operating system.You will require an internet connection to complete this guide. I primarily develop with the standard LAMP stack and so this guide with focus on setting up SSH access, NFS file sharing, Apache, PHP and MySQL on the Debian Linux distribution. This blog post is borne out of a difficulty in finding an authoritative and easy to understand guide to setting up a complete development environment with VirtualBox. Warning: this article was posted in August 2012 and some parts may now be out of date

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