How to Setup a PHPFreaks Development Environment

PHPFreaks will be using as their primary web server. Some people may not be as familiar with nginx as Apache seems to take over the other items. Here is a step by step setup for a Development Environment using a Linux based OS (If you use windows, setup a Debian VM in VMWare Player Free and simple).

Software Requirements

The following can be installed using the dotdeb.org repos for Debian

• PHP 5.4 with PHP5-FPM
• NGinx >= 1.2 (preferably 1.2.4)
• MySQL Percona >= 5.5

Hosts file

Modify your hosts file (/etc/hosts or c:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts) and add the following:

127.0.0.1 dev.phpfreaks.com

This will allow uniform usage of the dev.phpfreaks.com and it will point locally to your server.

Nginx setup

Since this is a development setup I will not go into the security part of it, we just need to make sure that nginx is working with php-fpm as well as your dev domain.