GizmoLA.com

To establish DNS resolution for your workstation, you simply need to add entries to the hosts file. On linux and OS X, this is in /etc/hosts. On windows XP this file is in the /WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc directory. This also works for Vista and Windows 7, however you have to open the file as an administrator. The easiest way to do this is to is to search for notepad, and then right click on it and choose "Run as Administrator". Locate the file and edit it to add entries for any vhosts you want to configure for development.

Updating your MySQL and PHP using an alternative Yum Repo

RHEL is very conservative in the way it handles package management, and often core packages lag far behind the latest releases. Fortunately, there are alternative repositories which provide updated versions of the LAMP stack, as well as support for commonly used php extensions that don't exist in the official RHEL repositories.

I recommend the use of Remi's Repository. Remi in turn depends on Fedora's "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL)" repository. Full instructions for configuration is provided at Remi's site, however, I've provided the steps to use for Centos/RHEL version 5, which is what I'm using in this series.

First we'll install support for EPEL using rpm.



The best way to handle this is to place the remi repo repository in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory. This will then allow us to refer to it when we want to install the updated packages we want.



Now you should be able to use the remi repo via yum, by specifying the "--enablerepo=" switch.

Remember to execute this steps as root.

First install the mysql-server.



Start the server to initialize it, and give the root account a password before you forget about it.







Now install php and related packages. This may vary depending on what you're doing. I've listed packages I find to be commonly useful.



Now you should be able to verify your version of php, using "php -v".

Adding a virtual host.

Open up your apache configuration file for editing and move to the bottom of the file and uncomment the NameVirtualHost line:



Then add a vhost section for your virtual server. You can add as many of these as you like for development purposes. Read the Apache manual if you have any questions about any of these directives. We'll call this server dev1.gizmola.com.



You'll need to create the directory where your site will live and set permissions. As this is a development server you don't need to be overly concerned, but it's a good practice to get into to setup a user and group to own the webspace for each virtual host. You can then use your ftp client or scp as the user, in the same way you would for a production or shared hosting server to update the files as you develop your website.



Anytime you make a change to the apache configuration files, or the php.ini file, you need to restart apache.

Make sure that you've installed a hosts file entry for your new vhost as described previously.




If all works as planned, the vhost should now answer. Put a phpinfo file (see Part 1 of this series) and point the browser to it to verify everything is working as planned.