Setting up Ubuntu for Web Development

This article assumes you have already installed Ubuntu, whether it's as a virutal machine or as a stand-alone system, there are a few things that you need to install and setup to get your web development enviroment up and running. The following procedures are steps I've put together and tested with multiple Ubuntu setups both virtual and standalone.

Prepare the System

The very first thing you should do immediately after completing the installation process is updating and upgrading your Ubuntu distribution.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

This could take a little while. There are usually a lot of things that need updating after installing Ubuntu. After you have finished with the updates and upgrades, run the following commands to clean things up:

$ sudo apt-get autoclean
$ sudo apt-get clean

Last thing before we restart. Open up a terminal window. Click on Edit then select Profile Preferences. Click on the Title & Command tab and then check the run as command login shell checkbox. Close the terminal and reopen a new one.

Both of those commands will clean out any 'fluff' that remains such as partial packages and the apt cache.

For Virtual Machines

If you are running a virtual machine, it's at this point you would install Virtualbox guest additions or VMWare Tools. If you are running a standalone system, you can skip this section and move along to step three.

VMWare Tools
$ sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools open-vm-dkms
Virtualbox Guest Additions
$ sudo apt-get install dkms virtualbox-guest-additions

Many other tutorials will suggest doing this a different way, but I've found this is the easiest and quickest way.

After you have finished installing the guest additions or VMWare tools, now would be a good time to restart.

Servers and Major Packages

Since our aim is web development, we're going to need Google Chrome and Firefox.

$ sudo apt-get install chromium-browser firefox

It's at this point I usually install Docky. Docky is a Linux version of Apple's app dock. I've found Docky to be indispensable and makes me feel so much more productive. All the apps I need are right there waiting for me.

$ sudo apt-get install docky

You could also install Docky via the Ubuntu Softawre center.

The next app we're going to install we'll have to get through the software center. Open up Ubuntu Software Center and do a search for Terminator. Terminator is a souped terminal that allows multiple windows to be tiled in the same frame. I simply can't live without it and in my opinion is a must have!

The last app we need to install is Sublime Text 3. Sublime Text is a code editor on par with (and in my opinion, better than) NotePad++, Emacs and Vim. To get this one running we need to navigate to their site and click on the Ubuntu 64 bit download. This will download a .deb file. One that finishes we can double click on that file and install normally.

After the install completes open up Sublime Text. From the menu select view, then show console. There will be a terminal bar that opens up at the bottom. Now we are going to install Sublime Package Control. Follow the link for the instructions on that one. It's pretty much a copy and paste, but there is a lot of code. So copy carefully!

Now we have a package manager for Subline Text!

The last little thing left to do with Sublime Text and that is to install GitGutter via the newly installed package manager. While still in Sublime Text, select Preferences from the menu, then Package Control. A window will pop up with a list of options, select Package Control: Install Package. That will take a few minutes to load. Once it does, type in GitGutter and just click on the the package named GitGutter.

Once that completes you are all set! Well, almost. There are a few more things left to do still. We need to get some servers running!!

LAMP Server, PHPmyAdmin, Curl, Git

Open up a terminal or your freshly installed Terminator. The next few parts will all be done by the comand line. First we are going to install a LAMP server (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), PHPmyadmin, CURL, Git and a few other dependencies. You will be prompted for usernames and passwords as you install. Be sure to write down your credentials, or at least make them easy for you to remember.

$ sudo apt-get install lamp-server^ phpmyadmin git curl libyaml-dev libxslt-dev libxml2-dev libsqlite3-dev

After those installs complete type the following lines substituting USER for your actual username:

$ sudo usermod -a -G www-data USER
$ sudo chown -R USER:www-data /var/www/*

Then there is a little setup for Git:

$ git config --global user.name [name]
$ git config --global user.email [email]
$ git config --global core.editor "subl -w"

Next we'll be installing Ruby and RVM.

$ \curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby=2.1.1

Ruby may take a while to install. So go grab a snack while it does it's magic. Once that finishes type in the next few lines:

$ rvm --default ruby-2.1.1

$ ruby -v
$ rvm -v

If get version numbers after typing in the -v commands, everything worked! Once you've got Ruby, you're going to need to have Ruby on Rails and SASS too!

$ gem install rails --version 4.0.4
$ gem install compass

$ mkdir rails_projects

The last main package we are going to install is node.js. I can't verify this next step, but if this works things have gotten much easier for installing Node! The last time I installed nodejs it was much more complicated, although nodejs has been gaining a lot of traction lately. It was only a matter of time before the install was simplified!

$ curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup | sudo bash -

$ sudo apt-get install nodejs

UI & Performance Tweaks

There are going to be a lot of commands in this section. The goal is to speed things up a little and also give you a little more control over the UI.

Now we're going to download a few packages for some UI Tweaks.

$ sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool gnome-tweak-tool compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-plugins-extra gnome-session-fallback
Disable guest/remote login
$ sudo gedit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

allow-guest=false
greeter-show-remote-login=false
Disable crash reports
$ sudo gedit /etc/default/apport

enabled=0
Disable dash serch/logging

Navigate to Settings, click on Privacy, then click Disable dash search.

Last little bits

And that pretty much covers it. The last little bit would be FTP, GIMP and MySQL Workbench. All of these can be installed directly from the command line:

$ sudo apt-get install filezilla gimp inkscape mysql-workbench

If you've followed all the steps and made it this far down, you are well on your way towards linux Web Development. I breezed over many topics I may cover in greater detail in the future. I hope this article was helpful and I hope you will enjoy developing in Linux just as much as I do!!

References