Virtual Box & Turnkey Linux

Turnkey Linux pre-built appliances run locally in Virtualbox can be a really flexible and useful tool.

Virtualbox really is a great piece of software. I know a lot of people use it so they can easily access another OS from their desktop.

I have also found it a really useful tool as an aid to web development – especially when used with some pre-built appliances from Turnkey Linux.

Turnkey Linux have dozens of prebuilt ‘appliances’ available for download. These are prebuilt virtual machines, with different software loaded onto a preconfigured LAMP stack.

These include things like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla but also include other things like invoicing, LDAP and CRM tools.

Below I have given an overview of a couple of use cases where I have found Virtualbox/Turnkey Linux really useful.

Easy Temporary Web Server

I needed to build a WordPress site and needed some form of local environment for development purposes. I also needed to occasionally give access to the client remotely.

It takes about 10 minutes to download and install the Turnkey Linux – WordPress appliance – all installed on a Linux OS with Apache, MySQL and PHP set up and ready to go.

I really like this solution:-

1. It is quick and easy to set up
2. It is easy to take snapshots of your virtual machine and revert back to previous versions.
3. Once you have your machine set up the way you want it is simple to clone it.
4. Once you have finished it is quick and clean to just delete an old machine.
5. If you set up NAT rule on your router you can easily expose your virtual machine to the web. This is great if you are collaborating with someone.
6. It’s also a great way to way to learn more about Linux and BASH.

SCSS Preprocessing

I like to use SASS/SCSS in my development pipeline using Gulp to compile my code into CSS.

Unfortunately I manage a site that sits on a server that doesn’t have node.js so was unable to get Gulp installed.

I came up with a workaround using a local virtual machine preloaded with node.js. Again, this took about 10 minutes to download and install from Turnkey Linux.

I could then mirror the CSS files from the WordPress installation onto this virtual machine.

Finally I created a set of Gulp tasks to compile my SCSS files into CSS, and then FTP them over to the correct location on the WordPress server.

There may well be other ways of achieving these thing – but these both worked for me pretty well. Hopefully they may give you some ideas on how you can use Turnkey Linux in your own projects.