Question

In my new job, I am expected to develop in PHP (with frameworks) and Python (frameworks and special tasks). I need a web server that I can use to test them out. It should be simple to configure and needs minimum of fiddling to try out different configurations.

They use WAMP since the applications are going to be deployed on Apache (on a VPS). I am looking for a linux alternative which is as simple.

Answer 1

Almost all standard Linux distros come with a LAMP stack. (Linux Apache MySQL PHP)

If you don’t have these installed and configured, you should be able to get them going on Ubuntu by doing a

sudo apt-get install php5 mysql-server mysql-client

(Apache, if not already installed, will be brought along as a dependency)

I’m sure you can do the same in Fedora, CentOS etc

sudo yum blah blah blah

It just magically works as long as you drop files into the web root.

Now as far as python and python web frameworks is concerned, you’re probably going to want to just use the development server that comes with those frameworks.

In the case of Django development, the server just magically knows how to read your templates and serve up your code. Deployment is a COMPLETELY different animal. You’ll need to setup mod_wsgi for Apache and then setup your config to serve static files from somewhere else. That’s something that’s better off left to your deployment team.