I use a MacBook Pro for my day-to-day operations here at CB1, INC. I’m a huge believer that a development environment should mimic the production environment, so I find myself running a couple virtual machines in VMware Fusion.
The following guide is a reference for myself as well as possibly a helpful resource for setting up your own Linux development environment. Here’s an checklist of the tasks to perform and software to install:
- Operating System
- Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit: I use Ubuntu Desktop in dev and Ubuntu Server in production
- Package updates and upgrades
- Network configuration (at least 2 static IP addresses)
- Development Tools
- C/C++ development environment
- Autotools
- Sun Java JDK
- Valgrind
- Version control: Subversion, Bazaar, git
- Android SDK
- Servers
- Samba (file sharing)
- SSH (remote shell access)
- Apache 2.2 (web server)
- nginx 0.8 (web server)
- PHP 5.3.3 (application server)
- PHP-FPM (PHP’s FastCGI process manager)
- MySQL 5.1 (database server)
- PostgreSQL (database server)
- memcached 1.4.5 (caching layer)
- Gearman (job queue manager)
- PHP Extensions
- Desktop Applications
- Google Chrome
- KCachegrind
- Appcelerator Titanium
Operating System
Start by installing Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop (or server). I’m not going to cover installing Ubuntu since there are already several other resources out there. Once Ubuntu is installed, open a Terminal:
user@ubuntu:~# sudo passwd root [sudo] password for user: <type your password> Enter new UNIX password: <type new root password> Retype new UNIX password: <type new root password again> passwd: password updated successfully user@ubuntu:~# sudo apt-get update user@ubuntu:~# sudo apt-get upgrade user@ubuntu:~# mkdir ~/src
New File Permissions
user@ubuntu:~# sudo pico /etc/profile
Change 022 to 002. This setting controls the default permissions when a new file or directory is created. This is mostly useful when managing files over Samba.
Network IP Addresses
Optionally, you may want to assign a static IP address. I set up one IP address for Apache and another for nginx.
user@ubuntu:~# sudo pico /etc/network/interfaces
The following is a reference for adding two static IPs. Change the IPs to meet your needs.
auto lo iface lo inet loopback auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.1.200 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.1.1 auto eth0:1 iface eth0:1 inet static address 192.168.1.201 netmask 255.255.255.0
user@ubuntu:~# sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
Packages
Here’s a bunch of packages that will set up compilers, version control, Java, MySQL, Apache, PHP, Memcache, Gearman, Samba, and more.
user@ubuntu:~# sudo apt-get install build-essential autotools-dev autoconf \
autoconf2.13 openssh-server ethtool traceroute openjdk-6-jdk \
mysql-server-5.1 bzr subversion subversion-tools ntp ntpdate \
libpcre3-dev libevent-dev automake bison libtool scons g++ \
ncurses-dev libreadline-dev libz-dev libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev \
ruby rubygems libzip-ruby1.8 libzip-ruby1.9.1 python-dev ruby-dev \
libdbus-glib-1-dev uuid-dev libpam0g libpam0g-dev gperf samba valgrind \
libxml2-dev libfreetype6-dev curl libcurl4-openssl-dev \
libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev git-core \
postgresql postgis gearman libgearman-dev php5 \
libapache2-mod-php5 php5-dev memcached php5-memcached \
php5-curl php5-gd php5-mysql php5-pgsql php-apc \
php5-xdebug php5-fpm libapache2-mod-fastcgi
MySQL
During the package install above, MySQL will prompt you for the root password.
After the packages are installed, we need to allow remote MySQL connections.
user@ubuntu:~# sudo pico /etc/mysql/my.cnf
Comment out the bind-address line.
# bind-address = 127.0.0.1
SSH
Next, you may optionally increase the connection keep alive interval for remote ssh connections. Timeouts aren’t really an issue for SSH’ing into a local VM, but really helps for remote installs.
user@ubuntu:~# sudo echo "ClientAliveInterval 60" >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Samba
Samba allows me to drag and drop files between my Mac and Linux VM. I personally do not enable/install Samba on production servers.
user@ubuntu:~# sudo cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.orig user@ubuntu:~# sudo pico /etc/samba/smb.conf
You can add a share such as the following:
[ubuntu]
force user = <your username>
writeable = yes
create mode = 644
path = /home/<your username>
directory mode = 755
force group = <your username>
Then create yourself a Samba user:
user@ubuntu:~# sudo smbpasswd -a <your username>
Apache 2
Apache is mostly configured out of the box, but I like to enable rewrite and SSL so I can test production features.
user@ubuntu:~# sudo a2enmod rewrite user@ubuntu:~# sudo a2enmod ssl
Since I’m going to run Apache and nginx, I’m going bind Apache to eth0.
user@ubuntu:~# sudo pico /etc/apache2/ports.conf
NameVirtualHost 192.168.1.200:80
Listen 192.168.1.200:80
<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
Listen 192.168.1.200:443
</IfModule>
Now we need to add eth0‘s IP to the default host:
user@ubuntu:~# sudo pico /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
<VirtualHost 192.168.1.200:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
LogLevel warn
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Restart Apache for the changes to take effect.
user@ubuntu:~# sudo apache2ctl restart
Gearman
By default, Gearman uses memory to store pending jobs in the queue, but I prefer to use MySQL for persistent storage. To do this, first create the queue database and table:
user@ubuntu:~# mysqladmin -uroot -p123123 create gearman user@ubuntu:~# mysql -uroot -p123123 -e "CREATE TABLE gearman.gearman_queue ( unique_key VARCHAR(64) NOT NULL, function_name VARCHAR(255) NULL, priority INT NULL, data LONGBLOB NULL, PRIMARY KEY (unique_key) ) ENGINE = InnoDB;"
Next update the init script to tell Gearman to use the database:
user@ubuntu:~# sudo mv /etc/default/gearman-job-server /etc/default/gearman-job-server.bak user@ubuntu:~# sudo echo "PARAMS=\"-q libdrizzle --libdrizzle-host=127.0.0.1" \ "--libdrizzle-user=root --libdrizzle-password=123123 --libdrizzle-db=gearman" \ "--libdrizzle-table=gearman_queue --libdrizzle-mysql\"" > /etc/default/gearman-job-server user@ubuntu:~# sudo /etc/init.d/gearman-job-server restart
Gearman PHP Extension
We need to download and install the Gearman PHP extension if we want to write PHP workers or post jobs to the queue.
user@ubuntu:~# cd ~/src user@ubuntu:~/src# wget http://pecl.php.net/get/gearman-0.7.0.tgz user@ubuntu:~/src# tar xzf gearman-0.7.0.tgz user@ubuntu:~/src# rm gearman-0.7.0.tgz package.xml user@ubuntu:~/src# cd gearman-0.7.0 user@ubuntu:~/src# phpize user@ubuntu:~/src# ./configure user@ubuntu:~/src# make user@ubuntu:~/src# sudo make install
Next, add the config file to load the Gearman PHP extension:
user@ubuntu:~# sudo echo "extension=gearman.so" >> /etc/php5/conf.d/gearman.ini
memcached PHP Extension
Since we have memcached and the memcached PHP extension install, let’s use it for storing session data:
user@ubuntu:~/src# sudo echo "session.save_handler = memcached
session.save_path = \"127.0.0.1:11211\"" >> /etc/php5/conf.d/memcached.ini
nginx
nginx is web server that is really fast. I use nginx as my primary development web server unless I’m running a web app that only works with Apache. You can choose to install nginx from package, but I like to live life on the bleeding edge, so I’ll be building nginx from source. To install nginx, we need to download the source, compile it, install it, and configure it.
user@ubuntu:~# cd ~/src user@ubuntu:~/src# wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-0.8.52.tar.gz user@ubuntu:~/src# tar xzf nginx-0.8.52.tar.gz user@ubuntu:~/src# rm nginx-0.8.52.tar.gz user@ubuntu:~/src# cd nginx-0.8.52 user@ubuntu:~/src# mkdir /var/lib/nginx user@ubuntu:~/src# ./configure \ --sbin-path=/usr/sbin \ --conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf \ --error-log-path=/var/log/nginx/error.log \ --pid-path=/var/run/nginx.pid \ --lock-path=/var/lock/nginx.lock \ --http-log-path=/var/log/nginx/access.log \ --http-client-body-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/body \ --http-proxy-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/proxy \ --http-fastcgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/fastcgi \ --http-uwsgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/uwsgi \ --http-scgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/scgi \ --with-http_stub_status_module user@ubuntu:~/src# make user@ubuntu:~/src# sudo make install user@ubuntu:~# sudo pico /etc/init.d/nginx
Here’s the init script that will start nginx for us:
#! /bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
DAEMON=/usr/sbin/nginx
NAME=nginx
DESC=nginx
test -x $DAEMON || exit 0
case "$1" in
start)
echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS
echo "$NAME."
;;
stop)
echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON
echo "$NAME."
;;
restart|force-reload)
echo -n "Restarting $DESC: "
start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON
sleep 1
start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS
echo "$NAME."
;;
reload)
echo -n "Reloading $DESC configuration: "
start-stop-daemon --stop --signal HUP --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON
echo "$NAME."
;;
*)
echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/$NAME {start|stop|restart|reload|force-reload}" >&2
exit 1
;;
esac
exit 0
Now we need to make the init script executable and enable it:
user@ubuntu:~# sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/nginx user@ubuntu:~# sudo update-rc.d nginx defaults user@ubuntu:~# sudo pico /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Here’s a starter nginx.conf with some basic settings:
user www-data www-data;
worker_processes 2;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
include mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
sendfile on;
tcp_nodelay on;
tcp_nopush on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
server_name_in_redirect off;
server_tokens off;
add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=1800;
add_header X-Frame-Options deny;
gzip on;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_comp_level 9;
gzip_types text/plain text/xml application/x-javascript text/css;
include /etc/nginx/sites/*;
}
user@ubuntu:~# sudo mkdir /etc/nginx/sites user@ubuntu:~# sudo pico /etc/nginx/sites/default
Now we need to set up a default host that supports PHP (via PHP-FPM, PHP’s FastCGI Process Manager) and we want the default host to use the eth0:1 IP address:
server {
listen 192.168.1.201:80 default;
server_name _;
root /var/www;
index index.php;
location / {
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
break;
}
}
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
location ~* (\.(htaccess|engine|inc|info|install|module|profile|po|sh|.*sql|theme|tpl(\.php)?|xtmpl)|code-style\.pl|Entries.*|Repository|Root|Tag|Template)$ {
deny all;
}
}
After the config files are good to go, start nginx:
user@ubuntu:~# sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start
Service Names
I also like to add service names so I can see what ports are in use when I run netstat. I added drizzle and Cassandra for fun despite this post not including them.
user@ubuntu:~# sudo cp /etc/services /etc/services.bak user@ubuntu:~# su root@ubuntu:~# echo "drizzle 4427/tcp drizzle 4427/udp memcached 11211/tcp memcached 11211/udp gearmand 4730/tcp gearmand 4730/udp fastcgi 9000/tcp cassandra 9160/tcp" >> /etc/services root@ubuntu:~# exit
Android SDK
The Android SDK is unfortunately not in package, so you’ll need to download it from the Android Developer site: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html.
user@ubuntu:~# wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r07-linux_x86.tgz user@ubuntu:~# tar xzf android-sdk_r07-linux_x86.tgz user@ubuntu:~# rm android-sdk_r07-linux_x86.tgz user@ubuntu:~# sudo mv android-sdk-linux_x86 /usr/local user@ubuntu:~# sudo find /usr/local/android-sdk-linux_x86 -type d -exec chmod 777 {} \;
You’ll need to add the Android SDK path near the top of your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc:
export PATH=${PATH}:/usr/local/android-sdk-linux_x86/tools
To manage your Android SDK packages and virtual devices, you’ll need to run the android app:
user@ubuntu:~# android
First go to Available Packages and download version 1.6 and 2.2 Android SDK packages. You can also choose to download the documentation, samples, and Google APIs.
Downloading the package may take several minutes. You don’t have to create a virtual device right now if you are planning on installing Appcelerator’s Titanium platform. You can exit the Android app when you’re done.
Desktop Apps
If you’re running Ubuntu Desktop, there are a couple handy apps I install. The first is Google Chrome and can be directly downloaded from the Google Chrome download page.
I find KCachegrind and GHex to be useful:
user@ubuntu:~# sudo apt-get install kcachegrind ghex
Appcelerator Titanium
Titanium is an awesome platform for developing desktop applications for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows as well as mobile apps for iPhone and Android. We use Titanium Developer to create Titanium projects. Begin by downloading the 64-bit version of Titanium:
user@ubuntu:~# wget -O titanium.tgz http://www.appcelerator.com/download-linux64
There’s also a 32-bit version available at http://www.appcelerator.com/download-linux32.
Next we unpack Titanium Developer and move it to a safe place:
user@ubuntu:~# tar xzf titanium.tgz user@ubuntu:~# rm titanium.tgz
Next you need to run the installer by double-clicking the Titanium Developer executable. Run the executable and then click the Install button. You can try installing to /opt/titanium, but you might need root privileges.
Next, there are a few issues with outdated libraries, so we simply delete them:
user@ubuntu:~# rm ~/.titanium/runtime/linux/1.0.0/libgobject-2.0.* user@ubuntu:~# rm ~/.titanium/runtime/linux/1.0.0/libglib-2.0.* user@ubuntu:~# rm ~/.titanium/runtime/linux/1.0.0/libgio-2.0.* user@ubuntu:~# rm ~/.titanium/runtime/linux/1.0.0/libgthread-2.0.*
Titanium Developer also complains if /bin/java doesn’t exist, so create a quick link:
user@ubuntu:~# sudo ln -s /usr/bin/java /bin/java
Relaunch Titanium Developer and enter your login credentials. If you don’t have a login, you can get a free account.
After signing in, you may notice there are some updates available in the upper right corner of the window. Click in the box and the updates will be downloaded and installed.
Optionally you can create a launcher icon for your GNOME panel. Don’t forget to escape spaces in the command with a backslash!
Finishing Touches
Lastly, I like to re-arrange my desktop to maximize my coding real estate.
Conclusion
That should get you up and running with a neato dev environment. If you need to run SSL, I wrote a post on Creating Self-Signed Certs on Apache 2.2 and Virtual Hosts and Wildcard SSL Certificates with Apache 2.2.
If you find any typos or additions, please feel free to sound off in the comments!