Setting up a development environment

In this section, we will build a development environment using VirtualBox and Vagrant.

Note

Magento official requirements call for Apache 2.2 or 2.4, PHP 5.6.x or 5.5.x (PHP 5.4 is not supported), and MySQL 5.6.x. We need to keep this in mind during the environment setup.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is powerful and feature-rich x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization software. It is free, runs on a large number of platforms, and supports a large number of guest operating systems. If we are using Windows, Linux, or OS X in our daily development, we can use VirtualBox to spin up a virtual machine with an isolated guest operating system in which we can install our server software needed to run Magento. This means using MySQL, Apache, and a few other things.

Vagrant

Vagrant is a high-level software wrapper used for virtualization software management. We can use it to create and configure development environments. Vagrant supports several types of virtualization software...