Sometimes you’ll face developments in different languages and environments and handling all of them in the same machine could be messy. So you might want to try installing those environments in virtual machines. In that way you will handle the code in your host and the guests will deal with the environment, and that gives you the advantage of coding without having the machines up.

Preliminary

• Using vim quick command reminder or you could use another editor, so wherever you see I’m using vim, replace with nano.
  • i - goes into insert mode
  • h, j, k, l - work as arrows
  • Esc - goes back into normal mode
  • :wq - writes the file and quits vim
• Every time I show a vim command and vertical points, it does mean I’m modifying at the end of the file.
• You will need to generate an ssh key pair. https://help.github.com/articles/generating-ssh-keys has a good step-by-step to get a key pair.
• You will need also to modify your /etc/hosts file to add the definition to your new virtual environment, just write something like this at the end $vim /etc/hosts

198.168.56.30 local.example.com

• It’s always good to have an ssh config file so you won’t need to connect using something like this

1$ ssh username@local.example.com

But simply calling this $ssh example. To do that do as follows. If the file doesn’t exist, just create it.

1$ vim ~/.ssh/config

Host example
User username
HostName local.example.com

Virtualization

Installing the OS

Since this is an example I’ll omit advanced setup and I’ll take the easy path so do as this checklist:

1. Start the virtual machine
2. Select the language, location and local formats
3. Select the keyboard distribution map
4. Choose the eth0 as your primary network interface. That point to the Adapter 1 which is the Bridged adapter
5. Assign a hostname
6. Choose a User, username, and password
7. Avoid encrypting your home folder
8. Choose your location for clock options
9. Use the Guided - use entire disk option to partitioning the disk, select the disk and accept writing the changes to disk (this will depend on your preferences and needs you can partitioning the disk as you want)
10. Wait for the installer to install the base system
11. Type the proxy info or left in blank if there is no proxy
12. Select No automatic updates
13. Choose no task to install additional services (optional, up to you)
14. Wait for the installer to finish
15. Accept the GRUB installation
16. And restart the machine
17. Login and update - upgrade the system. Then install ssh.

1$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get install ssh

Remove password prompt for sudo

Having these virtual environments demands several sudo uses in order to perform admin operations. So it turns quite annoying typing the password every time you need to do something as an admin. The solution is removing the password prompt for sudo callings.

Keep in mind that this is a suggestion for virtual machines to avoid typing the password several times, IT IS NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PRODUCTION OR YOUR HOST MACHINE. Granting access as root to everything might harm your system, or if there’s someone around your unattended, logged in machine, you could be victim of malicious crackers.

Add the following line at the end of the file (replace username with the username you chose for this example). Doing this probably opened nano instead vim, so to save type ^x (Ctrl + x), and Y to confirm, then return (Enter) to save into the same file.

1$ sudo visudo

username ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL  

Modify the interfaces definition

Since we chose the Adapter 1 to be our eth0 interface and the Adapter 2 to be our eth1 interface we need to configure the second one to act under the Host-only network.

1$ sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
# Host-Only Network adapter
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.56.30
netmask 255.255.255.0

Having this you can reach the server through your console using ssh. This step need a restart or getting the interface up.

At this point you still can’t reach this server using $ssh example because the guests doesn’t know who you are. In the preliminary section you learned how to create your ssh key pair. Now we need the whole content of the public key (id_rsa.pub or whatever you called it). That content must be added to an authorized keys file like this

1$ vim ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

# Key for my user from the host machine or any other comment
ssh-rsa SLKJDasodioaidsunoaXZxZxzxzOIUnaosiundOUnodUSAd909204398320948n2039480324nOIUNIodsnudoaiudnoauds09wu4390nu098nn09s8nd09a8dsn09a8sndajsdjkllajsldja0s098098098snd90a8sd09a8sdnalsjljOIJOjsodjas/234sdfdfsczxSDAcaCACCACACCA/asdasdascacacacacaca+sadjoij user@mail.com

Once your authorized keys file has your public key, you can reach the server using $ssh example and from there is easier to start the virtual machine and minimize it, and just managing it through console using the ssh connection.

Installing VirtualBox Additions

Before installing the VirtualBox additions we need to install some compatibility packages as follows:

1$ sudo apt-get install dkms build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)

After that we mount the VBoxGuestAdditions ISO image in the virtual machine as we loaded the Ubuntu image installer. After that we need to mount it in order to run the installer script.

1$ sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
2$ cd /mnt
3$ sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

Eventually that will show an error message but the additions will be installed successfully.

Installing the web server environment

For this example I chose PHP with MySQL and Apache2 like this:

1$ sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server mysql-client php5-mysql

Getting the host folder mapped into the virtual machine

The code hosted in the owner machine must be somehow detected in the virtual machine every time the machine starts up:

1$ sudo vim /etc/fstab

example /home/mesi/example vboxsf gid=33,uid=33,auto,rw 0 0 /home/mesi/example/app /home/mesi/example/app none bind

The meaning of the content is:

• example - Indicates the name of the shared resource
• the following path - indicates where the shared resource will be mapped
• vboxsf - the type of the resource we want to start up
• parameters - the parameters tell the system how the resource must be granted
• The code then will appear in the mapped folder, and now we create a symbolic link into /var/www for the mapped folder:

1$ sudo ln -s /home/mesi/example/ /var/www/

Now the final step is to create a virtual host for the example site in apache:

1$ sudo mkdir /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/sites
2$ sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/sites/example.conf

<virtualhost *:80>
      # Admin email, Server Name (domain name) and any aliases
      ServerAdmin amrendonsa@unal.edu.co
      ServerName example.com
      ServerAlias local.example.com
      # Index file and Document Root (where the public files are located)
      DirectoryIndex index.php
      DocumentRoot /var/www/example/
      # Custom log file locations
      LogLevel warn
      ErrorLog /home/mesi/logs/example/error.log
      CustomLog /home/mesi/logs/example/access.log combined
</virtualhost>

Then it’s necessary to have the rewrite apache module enabled:

1$ sudo a2enmod rewrite
2$ sudo service apache2 restart

Then it’s a matter to follow the indications for a CakePHP installation.

I just recorded a video showing the whole process…