[development] Developing for Drupal 7

[justin randell]

hi,

On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 3:10 PM, James Benstead
<james.benstead at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Justin,
>
> I have considered this - I saw it set up on someone's laptop at DrupalCon
> Paris and it seemed like a great idea, not least because it allowed for
> website testing in multiple virtualised platforms.
>
> I guess what I'd like to do is set up Ubuntu Server in Virtualbox, set up
> Drupal on that server, and then access it both from the native Mac
> environment, Windows 7 running on Virtualbox and Windows XP running on
> Parallels. I'm cool with setting up the virtual machines and there are
> doubtless loads of good tutorials on how to set up D7 on Ubuntu Server. It
> would be great to get some help - or pointers to good tutorials - on how to
> interconnect the Virtualbox VM with both the native Mac OS X and the
> virtualised Windows installations, so that the Ubuntu Server VM looks like a
> server from those platforms - i.e., so I can access it via an IP address in
> a browser, and connect to it via SSH, FTP etc. Any help you can give on this
> would be great.

we've found its useful to setup two interfaces on our VMs. the first
is a simple NAT interface so the VM has net access, and the a second
is a host-only interface.

by default, the host only interfaces on all of your virtualbox VMs
will be on a shared subnet, so they can all see each other, which is
what you seem to be after. it will also work if you have no net
access. i'm not sure how to plug parallels into that networking
equation - none of the mac people at zivtech use it in that way, as
virtualbox is just fine for windows virtualisation.

we've found that insisting that development be done on the production
OS, but leaving it up to developers to choose their desktop, has
worked really well, both in terms of giving those finnicky developers
some freedom (i don't know if i'd take a job that required me to use
proprietary crap like windows or OSX on my desktop) and not getting
bitten by bugs that hide in one OS setup only to surface on another.

hope that helps.

cheers
justin