This post goes out to all the coders using a Windows machine for development. Might be interesting for others aswell but I can’t say much about that as I’m a Windows user myself ;)
So what is this about? Well, some time ago I ran into smaller problems when trying to move a website from my local machine (which used XAMPP) to a real server (which was running on Ubuntu or some other Linux distro) and it was hard to fix the problems because of the differences between Windows and Linux servers.
I talked about this with a friend of mine and he told me about Virtual Machines (=VM). I had never heard of them before but what I heard was intriguing. Virtual Machines allow you to run a machine inside your machine, e.g. a Linux server inside your Windows machine. So you can use this VM with Linux to test your website locally before moving it to the real server. I know that no server is like the other and you might still run into some problems due to different library versions and so on, but you gotta admit that two Linux servers have way more in common than a Linux and a Windows server ;)
So in this post I’ll tell you how to setup your own VM with all the libs you need. Even if you haven’t worked with Linux before, you should be able to follow this tutorial/example easily.
Read more: DAVID BEHLER