Consistency – perhaps most importantly you can mimic the environment that you are deploying to.There are many benefits to working with a virtualised development environment over using your OS packages and installers (whether that be homebrew/macports on OS X or directly using package managers on whatever flavour of Linux you happen to be running) these include: Step 5: Share your files with your VirtualBox.Step 4: Configure Networking with VirtualBox.Step 2: Install VirtualBox, with an operating system.Step 1: Download VirtualBox and an operating system.You will require an internet connection to complete this guide. I primarily develop with the standard LAMP stack and so this guide with focus on setting up SSH access, NFS file sharing, Apache, PHP and MySQL on the Debian Linux distribution.

This blog post is borne out of a difficulty in finding an authoritative and easy to understand guide to setting up a complete development environment with VirtualBox. Warning: this article was posted in August 2012 and some parts may now be out of date

Virtualbox network settings from vdi