Mint LAMP Development Environment - Part Two

Linux Mint 15 ‘Olivia’

I decided it was time to ditch my Linux 13 KDE setup and try the improved MATE 1.6 desktop now that Linux Mint 15 released. I find it pretty slick and fast, a nice change from Windows when I decide to do some development in a true LAMP environment. Speaking of which, we need to get that installed. Before doing that, the first thing I like to do is open up a terminal and run:

sudo apt-get update

This will download the package lists from the repositories and update them with information on the latest package versions. If you have not installed LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP) please read my earlier blog post, Mint LAMP Development Environment. Then you can return to this post to add an IDE with debugging capabilities along with some other nice tools.

Xdebug

sudo apt-get install php5-xdebug

Check Xdebug

php --version

PHP 5.4.9-4ubuntu2 (cli) (built: Mar 11 2013 16:09:26) 
Copyright (c) 1997-2012 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2012 Zend Technologies
    with Xdebug v2.2.1, Copyright (c) 2002-2012, by Derick Rethans

Configure Xdebug

sudo pluma /etc/php5/mods-available/xdebug.ini

Add the following xdebug config values after the zend_extension path value so it looks like this.

zend_extension=/usr/lib/php5/20100525/xdebug.so
xdebug.remote_enable=1
xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp
xdebug.remote_mode=req
xdebug.remote_host=127.0.0.1
xdebug.remote_port=9000

NetBeans

The IDE I prefer for Drupal development as of this writing is NetBeans. I found this post, Configuring NetBeans for Drupal development to be very helpful. In the Usage section of the post, the author suggests using the sites folder of your Drupal installation when creating the New Project > PHP Application with Existing Sources. This did not work for me, instead, I selected the root folder of my Drupal install as the Sources Folder for the NetBeans IDE project import. By including the entire Drupal installation in my NetBeans project, I could step through and debug any of the Drupal code including modules in the sites folder.

NetBeans IDE Resources

Eclipse

Download

As of this writing, the latest stable version of Eclipse was Eclipse Juno (4.2). I downloaded the Eclipse Classic 4.2.2 64 bit Linux version from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/. Make sure you download the appropriate 32 or 64 bit version of Eclipse to match your Linux Mint operating system. To check which version of Linux Mint you are running, in a terminal, enter

uname -m

i686 = 32-bit; x86_64 = 64 bit

Install

Open up a terminal, change to the Downloads directory and and extract the archive.

cd ~/Downloads
tar xzf eclipse-SDK-4.2.2-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz

With superuser permissions, move the extracted eclipse directory and its contents into the /opt/ folder.

sudo mv eclipse /opt/

Create a symbolic link so you can start Eclipse from a terminal

sudo ln -s /opt/eclipse/eclipse /usr/bin/eclipse

Launch eclipse

eclipse

or if working on files directly in /var/www/

sudo eclipse

PHP Development Tools (PDT)

To install latest stable PDT build in Eclipse, select Help > Install New Software and enter following URL in the work with input:
http://download.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/updates/release

Recoll

You could use the terminal to search for files with commands such as find, grep, and awk. However, I like the the Recoll desktop search tool.

Filezilla

When you are ready to deploy your development work to a remote server via FTP or SFTP, this cross-platform FTP client is my goto tool for the job.

sudo apt-get install filezilla

Resources

Part 2 of 2 in the Mint LAMP Development Environment series.

Mint LAMP Development Environment

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