Quick easy steps to setting up a development Virtual Machine using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

The following is a PHP programmer’s Linux beginner guide to setting up a development environment.

  1. Establish where you want to host your virtual machine. If locally, you can download VMplayer, then download Ubuntu from the official website. Then you are supposed to activate SSH in order to connect to the virtual machine using putty. You can also host your virtual machine on Digitalocean or Linode.
  2. Install Webmin
    • wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.690_all.deb
    • dpkg –install webmin_1.690_all.deb
    • apt-get install perl libnet-ssleay-perl openssl libauthen-pam-perl libpam-runtime libio-pty-perl apt-show-versions python
    • apt-get -f install
  3. Install ngnix, php and mysql
    • sudo apt-get update
    • sudo apt-get install mysql-server php5-mysql
    • sudo mysql_install_db
    • sudo /usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation
    • sudo apt-get install nginx
    • sudo service nginx start
    • ifconfig eth0 | grep inet | awk ‘{ print $2 }’
    • sudo apt-get install php5-fpm
  4. Add apache
    • sudo apt-get update
    • sudo apt-get install apache2
    • sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mcrypt
  5. Install Jabber
    • sudo apt-get install jabberd2
  6. Add a nice theme to webmin from:

The upper commands have been tested on Linode. They have been retrieved from:

Please remember to update the installed modules and software. A nice tutorial on the subject above can be found at: