It doesn’t matter what you are doing, whether that is managing a web site that you run using an application such as Wordpress or writing your own application from scratch. You need a development environment. To run this site, I have my main webhosting with an installation of Wordpress. My Wordpress installation has a custom theme and I’ve installed a selection of plugins to get the functionality I require.

I did not prepare this work on my live webserver.

Since I set this site live, with Wordpress 2.0.5, two security releases (2.0.6 and 2.0.7) were released. Then Wordpress 2.1 was released, followed by three security updates. My site has now run six versions of code, it’s fully up to 2.1.3 (2.1.1 was compromised on the Wordpress site before I downloaded it and they advanced to 2.1.2 to avoid confusion).

But, when I did the upgrade work, I didn’t do it on the live site.

Once you have a site live with some software, you need to perform the upgrade on a copy of that site and refine the process so that when you do come to take your site down for the upgrade process it is a simple exercise that results in your site being live once more as soon as possible. Not leaving your blog down for days.

When you’re working on software, you want full control of the environment so you can debug and experiment to identify what the problems you are having are. You have to have a development environment.

Now, most web hosting is LAMP. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. For things like Wordpress, Geeklog and the majority of web development, LAMP is the most available and most used platform. How do you go about having a LAMP environment to develop on? I would strongly suggest that you don’t want to use any hosting provider as your development environment. You may want a staging host, a subdomain that you perform the upgrade on before copying to your live environment. But the trial and error troubleshooting and testing phase should be on your Development Environment.

Now, if you’re not the kind of person who has a Linux box to hand that they can use for this, fear not, Apache runs anywhere, as does PHP and MySQL. You could install them on your Windows Vista/XP/2000/98/95 box (or even your Mac) and have an environment there. There are even bundled installers that give you the AMP portion all running in a few mouse-clicks.

But, I don’t use one machine. I have two laptops at home, and I could be on either, depending on what else I need to do and whether or not my wife wants to play games. I have a machine at work that I don’t want to have a copy of my development environment permanently set up on, and I don’t want the headache of keeping three environments in synch.

So, I had a bit of a Google to try and find a solution for a portable development environment. I’ve seen portableapps.com’s [1] available end user software and started looking for options for AMP development that can be extended to include Python, Ruby and other languages. I found a good article at firepages that was my starting point.

Since I first created my portable environment, portableapps.com released a portable XAMPP which would have saved me the effort. If you just need an AMP instance, I would investigate that. However; I want to understand my environment, know how it hangs together, feel confident playing with it and be installing Ruby and so forth. It’s also far more interesting to me, to build my own. Sad, but true.

I’m going to write a few articles on getting your AMP instance set up on your USB key, as I’ll need that environment to talk about evaluating software libraries and starting development. So this is going to briefly interrupt the flow of the Multiblog articles.

I decided on a simple structure for me USB key, I have a development folder in the root. This contains an Apache folder, a PHP folder, a MySQL folder and an Applications folder. Also in the root I have a Tools folder, containing installers for tools I use all the time, and a Downloads folder where I place the tar balls of things like Wordpress when I download them.

I then set out to start installing.

Popularity: 28% [?]

This is version 2 of this entry and was posted 1 year, 5 months ago on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Portable Development. It's popularity ranking is Popularity: 28% [?]. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can see changes since the last version here.