Personal Linux Server

[onlyican]

Hi all

 

I have a ubuntu box at home which I use as a mini home server (with capabilities to Remote SSH)

 

Recently my hard drive failed so I am in the process of rebuilding the box and I thought instead of just having a dev LAMP box, why not set up for testing as well, such as Selenium, PHPUnit ect

 

My question is what tools do you all suggest I have on the box to fully utilize my mini server.

 

Here are the things I plan to install so far

 

The obvious

Apache 2

PHP

MySql

OpenSSH

 

 

The "Would be handy"

GIT Server

 

 

Testing options

PHPUnit (well duh)

Selenium

Bamboo (or equivalent)

PHP code Sniffer

Ant Deploy scripting

 

 

Any suggestions / other options would be much appreciated (basing some apps based on previous companies usage)

[pantu]

I am not sure If Ubuntu ships with an email server by default and if not you might consider installing one like sendmail or postfix in order to be able to use the php mail functions.

[Christian F.]

If you installed Ubuntu server you might have a mail daemon installed by default. The desktop versions does not, and you will need to install one via apt in that case.

[androidd]

For Ubuntu Server 12.04 during install process you have option to install mail server elements however seems that most add on Dovecot for Pop and Imap and then some other webmail if that is something you need. Also server doesn't come with a gui so if you needed one then you might want to find a stable copy of Debain or LTS version of Ubuntu Desktop(Not a huge fan of the new design but thats me) and then install your server elements (Apache, MySql, PHP, etc..)

As far as tools since I run server and no gui seems that shell is my best friend / Geany on my Win box but it's easier to make change for me in the shell environment.

webmin is handy if you need to administer the machine if you go the Ubuntu server route.

[QuickOldCar]

I installed ubuntu server many times at my house

 

download and install Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS

 

There is a decent tutorial here on setting it all up with ispconfig

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu-12.04-lts-apache2-bind-dovecot-ispconfig-3

 

If you already have the server installed you can use taskel and add anything additional

sudo apt-get install tasksel

sudo  tasksel

Select what you want additional

 

This is how to add the desktop gui to the server edition (I like kubuntu)

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/install-gui-in-ubuntu-server.html

 

You'll see webmin there which is also handy

 

phpmyadmin for managing your databases

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

 

and then do this so apache finds it

sudo ln -s /usr/share/phpmyadmin /var/www

 

 

Something you may be interested in is turnkey virtual appliances, download,burn,install and ready to go solutions

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/

I've done them in vmware,virtualbox and virtualpc, they work pretty good.

[448191]

If you want to use Selenium/Webdriver (and you should if you're thinking about creating a serious test platform), you'll need a lot more than suggested so far. You can either do a minimal setup (just install a gnome or unity on top of a server edition) or go multi platform / browser version, which means your box becomes a VM host. For the latter you should look at KVM and Xen, both are non-trivial to get properly set up, know what you're getting into. KVM might be the quicker solution, but still not trivial.

 

It depends on how much value automated functional testing and cross browser compatibility is to you, in any case it is not something to be taken lightly. At work we use SuaceLabs, precisely for the reason that setting up and maintaining a Selenium testing cluster is "expensive": (it takes a lot of time and effort). I didn't see anyone mention Jenkins or Hudson, I would strongly suggest diving into that before Selenium/Webdriver.