Shift8 Creative Graphic Design and Website Development

I finally took the plunge and got a new laptop (with the kind help of my parents with a generous Christmas gift). It's been a few years really and I did need a new computer. What did I end up with? Well, I almost got a Macbook Pro (of course) being the good web developer (and graphic designer) that I am. Apple finally came down on their pricing a while ago so I was all ready to do that but then saw this HP ENVY ended up being half the cost for better hardware. Apple needs to put a 1GB graphics card in their Macbook Pros, 512MB on a $3,000 laptop is just pathetic. 

So reasoning aside, how was I going to setup this machine for web development, design, graphic design, and photography? Prior to this computer, I had dual boot Windows (Vista, ick) and Fedora Linux. Awesome, it ran fast it was simply to setup a webserver and it basically mirrored the servers I worked on. Photo editing was tough in Linux and forget Adobe (though there is a portable version of Photoshop that works); GIMP was the real tool. So I had to go back to Windows for any design work. Not that I do a whole lot these days and that's more because I've learned to deal w/o those nice programs and get by with GIMP (and GIMP is good don't get me wrong).

Now this time around I decided that since I have 4 cores (8 virtual) why not run virtualized machines? No more dual booting, no more hard drive partitioning, etc. So I setup Fedora 14 virtualized, and here's in my opinion, the very best setup for web development/design that you can get (and you can do this if you have a Mac too):

Base Host OS: Windows 7 (or OS X)

Virtualized Guest OS: Linux and Windows (or OS X, oops yea you can virtualize this, but its slow, that's ok though read down further why)

So you virtualize Linux so you can setup a web server that's practically identical to the ones you'll be uploading your files to for the live sites. Why setup a web server with Mac ports, homebrew, or MAMPP? That's silly. Why use XAMPP or setup IIS if using a Windows host? Oh god no IIS. OS X is better but at the same time, you just can't beat a Linux package manager for speed and ease (and grabbing all the libraries you need when you do need to compile something). Also, you really want to mirror as close as you can the actual server that your files will live on because then you'll run into less accidents. You know that everything will work, not "should" work. Rolling with updates is also much easier.

So the trick is you have to make sure your virtual machine has internet access and it's IP is static. With VMWare and Virtualbox you can set things to NAT and then within the guest OS (in Linux' settings for the network card) you can assign a manual IP address within the range of allowed addresses. I have mine at like 192.168.126.200 or something. It won't conflict with any other machine on my LAN. It's not even in the same range.

You will want to probably disable SELinux since you aren't too concerned with security and it'll make things a lot nicer when it comes to shared folders. Make sure your firewall settings are letting Apache through as well. You'll want to setup a shared folder so your files are hosted on your host machine. So in my case Windows 7 holds my web site files. I have a different folder for each site and the Apache conf settings uses virtual hosts to assign a new domain to each site/folder. You can Google all of this. I don't want to make this a tutorial (unless I get some requests) but just a general idea for how to set things up. Pointing the Apache conf to the location for the shared folders. Awesome. Now you can edit files on the host OS with the editor of your choice, no problemo. Use git, svn, etc. The most important thing about this is that your files are now always available whether running the virtual machine or not and they are a bit better protected. Say your virtual machine gets corrupt somehow? Oh crap! Well, not anymore. Now it's just setting it up again worst case scenario, a few Apache config files lost. No big deal.

How do you access this webserver from the host OS? could setup a DNS server (like BIND) if you were nuts. Then set your host OS to look at that DNS before going out to your ISP. I personally didn't want to do that because I figured it would make things just ever so slightly slower. Then if Linux wasn't running, maybe even slower until things timed out before moving on to the next DNS. Instead, I alter my hosts file. In Linux this is easy because Gnome (and I'm sure other desktops) has a GUI to add entries to your hosts file. Very nice, but wait just one minute! There's an app for that! Windows and OS X both have 3rd party apps that will allow you to change up your hosts file in a nicer way. The one on Windows 7 that I'm using now is called HostsMan. It's actually quite cool and can provide some other handy features to help warn you about possible hijacks and such. Anyway, I just use it for my sites. So I have a lithium.local for example that points to the IP of the Linux virtual machine. Save that...Open up the web browser and bingo! Again, there's apps for OS X too and some that also work in your dashboard I believe, which is handy.

Yes, I do need to add a new setting (line) each time I setup a new site, but I have to also do that in Linux under the Apache configuration for the virtual host anyway. No big deal, it takes less than 5 minutes one time every time I setup a new site. I could figure some sort of automation script maybe or something through the web browser. You could setup a free control panel like you see on hosting providers...But I'm ok with typing in the config manually from a terminal.

Bonus! I don't need to use Putty (or Kitty) because I can use the terminal from Linux. Putting the virtual machine into "unity" mode, or "seamless" mode for Virtualbox users, will make this so much nicer. I basically now look at things and get confused...Am I running Windows? Or Linux? Nice, best of both worlds.

Now, virtualizing OS X isn't kosher. It's a no no. But...You can actually do it. I find that I can just test with Chrome and Firefox and be ok. I don't use OS X. There's also a Safari for Windows (though it's slightly different I hear). However, Firefox and Chrome are pretty good and I don't typically end up with OS X only CSS issues. Conversely, if you're doing this in OS X, you can virtaulize Windows XP or 7 or ME? Vista? No no, you'll be ok with XP or 7, haha. Now you have two virtual machines giving you ALL of the major operating systems. Why do this? Well, dual booting is a pain in the rear and it doesn't matter how fast your Windows or OS X guest runs because you're just going to use it for browser testing. Microsoft used to have images available just for this purpose. They were incomplete operating systems, but gave you just enough to test browsers. Personally I think it was genius, but also...They owed it to the world because of Internet Explorer.

So there you have it. My idea of the perfect setup for a web developer/designer. I can run all of the programs that I want to for design (since Linux isn't great for design of course) and also have my proper webserver with Linux. There's also a few helpful apps that Linux has that neither OS X or Windows has so now I won't miss out on those. I can test just about every web browser and make sure my site looks the same on all. The things we have to go through in order to make web sites. It's absurd...But at least we don't need 5 computers to do it. Running two operating systems full time is not a big deal either on any newer i5 or i7 processor. Also as an added bonus I can play Starcraft 2 :)

Yes, Apple fanboys will say they can do it all with just OS X...Well, no you can't actually. You can't test all the browsers without virtualizing and your web server is just going to be a joke running on OS X. I've setup several web servers before on just about every operating system short of Solaris. So believe me, you want the "real deal" you want something that's going to reflect the final live environment. You don't see hosting companies offering up OS X to run your web sites now do ya? Also, it's good to have your web server virtualized because it doesn't take a lot of resources to run and it will familiarize you with a Linux machine. That's important! It's also still just as convenient as setting up (through port/brew or compiling from scratch) a web server on OS X. In fact, it's more convenient. While MAMPP is probably the most convenient, it doesn't offer enough when it comes to all those PHP extensions. Now this is strictly speaking to PHP developers...Now how about you want to run other things on the server? Some things simply aren't available for Windows or OS X, and that's why you really want to virtualize Linux for your web development. Plus, you can have multiple machines and simulate/setup/test out load balancing and database clustering...But of course, to each their own.