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It’s been a while since I’ve been active on tumblr. This will most likely stay this way for the next foreseeable future as I’ve started a little sideproject  called qbotx. I’m not saying what it is here, but I will blog about the stuff I’m doing in  the background. Have a look at http://blog.qbotx.com if you like. 

In case you're looking for something nice to play around- have a look at the Digital Ocean. Enter the code "SHIPITFAST10" for 2 month free!

If you haven't heard of Cloud IDE's for web development, you have probably been in a coma or you don't code for the web. While there are a lot of "editors" and attempts to create an online IDE- few are living up to the hype, especially when you are a php developer.

I have stumbled over Nitrous.IO a few month back, and I was already impressed by the swiftness and the usability of it. The only problem I had back then, was the fact that PHP wasn't supported. While I do enjoy my nodeJS- I'm a PHP developer at heart (even more after the release of Laravel 4!). Back then, I have asked the guys over at Nitrous if it would be possible to have a pre configured PHP/Apache/mySQL & Composer Box. Guess what? They've listened!

You can now setup a Laravel Development environment in from scratch in under 5 minutes! And here is how:

1. Go to http://www.nitrous.io and create an account.

2. Create a new box and select the PHP Option

3. Go to the terminal tab and initialize your laravel project using composer:

composer create-project laravel/laravel --prefer-dist ~/workspace/<yourproject>

SHOULD YOU RUN INTO MEMORY PROBLEMS, DO THIS: 

composer selfupdate

4. While composer is downloading Laravel, go to the file explorer tree and select "Show Hidden"

5. We are now interested in 2 files: httpd.conf and if you want to use mySQL php.ini. Open both by double clicking them.

5.1: http.conf: At the moment, the Apache server is out of the box configured to to route http requests to: 

/home/action/workspace/www

Since Laravel assumes that the public folder is used, we change the route to:

/home/action/workspace/<yourproject>/public

After you have done this, save the file.

5.2: php.ini <optional>: If you want to use Laravel with mySQL you have to enable the mysql extensions. Use the find button to get to the mysql entries. Remove the ";" in front of "extension=". After you have done this save the file.

6. That's it! You're done configuring your development environment! The only thing left to do is to restart Apache. Go to the Autoparts menu and pick: Autoparts -> Start/Stop Parts. 

If you now select Preview and Port 3000, you will see the Laravel "you have arrived." page. 

Vagrant/Puppet GUI Configuration

Very very useful.

Really.