Jay Paroline

For a long time now I’ve used xampp for testing my scripts locally before committing to the codebase and testing in our dev environment. Apache for windows, at least in this configuration, was incredibly unstable: major memory leaks, and it crashed if it received two connections at once. It has been good enough for rudimentary testing, but always a bit annoying. The memory leak issue caused me to shut down apache as soon as I was done testing any script.

I recently discovered Portable Ubuntu or pubuntu for short, which allows you to run ubuntu inside of Windows (yes, I still prefer windows as my desktop environment). I set up apache and php inside of pubuntu, and after following this suggestion (with my own hacks to make it work over the network: see thread), and pointing apache to the mount point for my workspace (also living in windows), everything is working quite smoothly. Apache is both more stable and faster. Ironically, pubuntu with apache running inside of it is more lightweight than the Apache for Windows distribution that came with xampp was for me.

What’s especially cool is that because of the way pubuntu mounts drives, pubuntu is seamlessly accessing my workspace to serve up files. That means I can edit a php file in my windows IDE of choice (notably not Vim), and that change is immediately reflected in pubuntu with no effort on my part.