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Ubuntu for PHP and Web Developers
Posted by
James Leckie on the 13th of August, 2009
Posted in Web Development | 2 Comments ›
I have been using Ubuntu on my development desktop for around 3 months now in our digital agency, Alaress. Its about time I write about my experiences using Ubuntu as a development platform for PHP.
Firstly let me say my experiences in general have been very positive. The people working on Ubuntu have done a great job and I am extremely excited about the way things are going.
As a firm believer of using the best tool for the job, I have been using Windows with Putty, Dreamweaver, TortoiseSVN, SQLyog, Firefox, Thunderbird and Filezilla as my primary development toolset. These applications have performed admirably apart from a few issues with Dreamweaver in the early days it now is a very stable and reliable tool.
In the past I have toyed with Linux desktops but found the graphical polish lacking and the IDE’s either nonexistant or overwhelmingly complex and slow. With the Jaunty release from Ubuntu things have really changed. Coupled with a PHP specific version of Netbeans and we now have a platform that can be used on a daily basis, and after 3 months, does not look like I will be going back.
The following is a bit of a guide on how I got to where I am comfortable working with Ubuntu on a daily basis.
Download lastest Ubuntu and install here: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download
Install restricted extras so you get codecs, flash and other naughty things
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
Theme your environment
Making your development environment a pleasurable place is very important. Ubuntu has lots of tricks up its sleeve. Top of the list is the great font rendering to make the crowds go oohh. Followed by compiz effects to make the crowd go aaahhh. Everyone in the office will be crowding around just to see you move windows around. Start by looking at these:
Dust
Fonts
I recommend the URW Gothic L
On terminal the system beep got annoying real fast, here is how to fix it:
Open System → Preferences → Sound and select the System Beep tab. Uncheck the Enable system beep box.
PHP Dev Applications
Gnome-Do
Those familiar with the excellent Quicksilver for Mac will immediately know the value of this app. Launching applications and searching for files has never been so easy. Plus plugins make this a killer app.
Netbeans PHP
As of Netbeans 6.5 there is specific PHP support. This comes with all your IDE goodness that you never knew you needed in Dreamweaver but now can’t live without. For more info on IDE’s check this article out.
To get netbeans you first need java installed.
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-font
Next download latest netbeans php from the site.
You could also setup a LAMP stack locally on your desktop if you want to debug PHP but most of us already have dev servers.
There is SVN support built in so I can manage my repositories using Netbeans. Its not great and the conflict merger is pretty buggy. Its missing lots of features like blame and a good history browser but it will suffice.
Finally if you FTP to a remote site for development. You can create a shortcut to upload to the site like in Dreamweaver with crt-shift-u.
Firefox + Thunderbird + Filezilla
These programs are natively ported and work as expected. One issue is that the Ubuntu repos does not keep up with Firefox updates as often as I would like so I have installed my own version that I update independently using Ubuntuzilla.
Wine + SQLYog
There is no replacement for SQLyog in the open source world. SQLyog is one of those applications that works and works really well and is worth the price. Fortunately the developers realised that Linux needs support as well and although there is no native port they do test in Wine and the program works seamlessly from install to launch.
NautiliusSVN
As a replacement for TortoiseSVN I have been experimenting with this program. Its has a great feature set and works almost identically to Tortoise. However it is quite slow when working with large repositories in the order of minutes which is a deal breaker. Perhaps the next release will be faster so keep an eye on this.
on the 16th of October, 2009 1:21 am
Thanks for good read, bookmarked your blog for future referrence
on the 17th of October, 2009 2:19 am
I spent a lot of time reading your blog, it’s awsome