Efficient portable PHP development environment?

[Abuda]

Hi,

I hope this belongs to the right sub-forum.

I'm gonna be on the move for quite some time, and I was wondering if there was an [almost] ideal portable PHP development environment, which I can treat just like the non-portable counterpart, which will include using Composer, Laravel, etc.

 

With a little research I found http://zwamp.sourceforge.net/ and http://www.codelobster.com, but I'm not sure how efficient they are.

Any of you guys use this approach?

 

 

Thanks.

[trq]

Define "portable".

[gizmola]

Many people utilize virtualization.  It allows you to run a virtulized server on your workstation, and interact with that server in the same way you would if you were hosting a site.  Even better, you can achieve rapid iteration using shared folders so your edits show up near instantly.

 

There is also a popular wrapper system called Vagrant (see https://www.vagrantup.com) that offers portability and ease of environment setup.  Vagrant boxes are pre-built base OS installations for all the popular unix distress, and are then supplemented by vagrant files can include provisioning setup that can do pretty much anything you can imagine.  There are many already created that will use chef or puppet to do in some cases most, or all of the work to setup the development environment, starting up databases and services and configuring them for initial use.

 

Out of the box vagrant works with oracle (formerly sun) virtual box, which is free, but it also has support for other provisioners like vmware.

 

From the point that you have the ability to instantiate, replicate and bring up and down independent local server environments, you can be unplugged and still work away on your projects.

 

You probably want to download the php documentation locally as you'll want to have that for reference, as well as having offline access to any other server or language development you want to use.

 

I'm not going to get into IDE discussion because that has entire threads on it easily found.  Zend, EclipsePDT, netbeans and what has been very popular in recent years - phpstorm amongst others, are all products that can improve your development experience.  You can see a relatively recent poll done by site point here: http://www.sitepoint.com/best-php-ide-2014-survey-results/