Using Virtualbox & Turnkey Linux To Launch a Fast WordPress Test Environment!
ScatteredBlogger on ScatteredBlogger!
Have you been tempted to try out some new theme or plugin that you downloaded for your WordPress website but were to concerned that you might mess something up? If not then you must be a beast or maybe you didn’t know how easy it was to setup a fast WordPress test site. You could use your existing web host to create a new website for testing, or you could leverage the power of free tools to be up and running in minutes on your local machine. (mah-sheen)
Virtualbox FTW
In order to follow this tutorial you will want to download your free copy of Virtualbox.
Once you have downloaded Virtualbox you will be ready to download some virtual machine images or you can create your own if you feel the need. For this tutorial though we will use some pre-built images thanks to the folks over at Tunkeylinux.org There are several images they put together for both VMware and Virtualbox as well as ISO files which can be burned as an image and then installed inside of a VM or on most computers as the host operating system. You will want to download the WordPress virtual image for this exercise located here.
Download the OVF File..
Once you have downloaded the OVF image file, you will want to click on: File > Import Appliance. You will then be presented with a screen to point to the location of where you have downloaded and unzipped the OVF image file. Just accept the default options and then you can change them in the “settings” option once it’s imported.
Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager
So at this point you can click on start and then follow the prompts to set the “root” password which is the administrator account for Linux, the “PHPmyadmin” password and finally the “wordpres” admin login password. You will probably want to kip through the “HUB API” screens and it will then issue you the IP address to connect to from your browser. More than likely it will be 192.168.1.100.
Scope the video below for a more in-depth walk-through on how to download and configure you very own WordPress development image running inside of Virtualbox.
Post any questions in the comments and I will answer as best I can. Cheers!
