Note: This article assumes basic knowledge of the command line on Windows and Unix. In this article I’ll be looking at Vagrant and VirtualBox. Basically what this means is that you can set up a lightweight Unix server that runs within Windows, so you can still use your favourite Windows text editors and tools but when it comes to running the code it will be run in Unix. It can be done using a couple of Windows programs that enable the creation of virtual Unix machines. But this is actually not the case, it is possible – and in fact, not all that difficult – to do this. If the developer, knowing that the production environment runs PHP5, had set up their development environment accordingly this bug would have been noticed much sooner.Īt first impression, it seems impossible that a developer writing and testing code on their Windows PC can set up a local development environment that matches their live web server which in the vast majority of cases is running on Unix. If this code was then deployed on a PHP5 environment, the code would not work. And secondly, when that code is deployed to a production environment you know that it should theoretically work straight away seeing it was written in a matching development environment.Ī simple example of failing to do this would be if a developer was using a PHP7 development environment and wrote a statement which included the spaceship operator. Firstly, if multiple developers are working on a project then you can be sure that code written by one person will work for the other developers.

There are a couple of reasons why this is beneficial. One of these practices is setting up a development environment that matches the production environment that you are using. And the more seriously you start to take following best practices. The longer you spend developing software, the more seriously you start to take setting up the perfect development environment. If you would like to review that, please visit In the last article I looked at setting up a simple development environment on Windows using WAMP.

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