One of the most time consuming process as a Drupal developer is creating a development environment for building Drupal websites.

I typically use the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack  for my websites. However, I prefer to use Windows operation system for other Mir

A developer can spend hours setting up the following components:

• Installing Linux
• Installing and configuring Apache
• Installing and configuring MySQL
• Downloading and configuring Drupal and Drush.  If you don’t use drush, you are missing out on a very powerful command line tool for managing your sites.

On Drupal.org, Michael Cole posted a method to pre-package a downloadable PHP / LAMP Development environment for Drupal.   The package includes all the necessary components to build a fully comprehensive Drupal development environment.

What’s included in the package:

• Support for Drupal 7 and Drupal 6
• Ubuntu Linux, Apache, MySQL, APC, XDebug, IMAP, UploadProgress
• Firefox (with developer plugins) and Chrome
• Drush, drush make, and custom drush commands
• Install scripts for: Apache Solr, Aegir, Hudson, and Oracle
• Netbeans and Eclipse, configured with XDebug
• XHProf and Webgrind profilers. Emails logged as files
• cvs, subversion, git, bazaar

Michael included the core components to get you and your Drupal development website projects kick-started without spending time installing core components.

The instructions are simple. Download and install VirtualBox from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. Download the VirtualBox image from http://drupal.org/project/quickstart and import the image into VirtualBox.

In future a future post, I will share my Drush make scripts for downloading and managing Drupal contrib modules. I refuse to add any contrib module into local source control management repositories. I find it more efficient to download contrib modules when I ready to deploy a build to staging and production environments.

This is first ever Blog post, ever.   Comment and let me know what you think.