Virtual Development Environments

There are lot's of different Drupal development environments out there. Some only use a dedicated server for development work, others have local installation (like MAMP on Mac OS X and WAMP on Windows).

Most Drupal servers (arguably) run some variant of Linux, and there is sometimes a big difference in how those environments are set up in contrast to tools like MAMP and Windows development environments.

A way to get a unified and isolated development environment is using a virtual instance to run the development environment. That way you can more easily adapt to a standardized environment without the need for a unified hardware and software stack for all your developers.

There are many ways to set up such an environment and we at NodeOne would like to share our solution, vnodectrl and where we are going, which is the vagrant project, and compare it with other ideas like The quickstart project and to some degree the Pantheon project. Maybe we can combine forces? =)