Setting up a Linux virtual machine for easy web development on Windows

Being a Windows user can be a real drag when trying to use technologies originally designed for the Unix world.  This hardship is especially prominent in web development.  While I do admire ASP.NET MVC, and enjoy being able to develop in C# as much as possible, my real passion right now is using Python with the Django framework.

For simple applications, I often start out using Cygwin, the Django development server, and a sqlite database (side note: have you ever tried to get the MySQLdb library installed in Cygwin?  What a mess!).  But that setup can only take me so far.  Not only is development a little tricky on a Windows box, but deployment and testing can be a mess.  Most of the time, my web apps will be running on a Linux server.  Ideally, I would be able to test everything locally in an environment as close to production as possible (and as a personal choice, without switching my development machine to run Linux).

For a while, I tried to set up my Windows machine to run Apache and MySQL.  That’s fairly easy to do with something like XAMPP.  The hard part is finding all of the necessary extensions and bindings to run (if you want to go that route, this StackOverflow question is a good starting point).  While I did get everything working in the end, it was a real pain.  My machine was filled with extra applications and services that take up resources simply to provide me with a testing environment, and setting up a new development machine became a very non-trivial task.

Read more: dan carroll

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