Hi all,

After my last post, I realized it might be nice to provide a clean VMware image of FreeBSD 6.2 for folks who want to follow along as I try out the various PHP frameworks.

The first thing you’ll need to start up the virtual machine is one of the following free VMware tools:

• VMware Player
• VMware Server

Both of these tools allow you to run virtual machines on your server and/or desktop. The VMware Player is most useful if you just want to run pre-built virtual machines and use them for experimentation and evaluation. VMware Server gives the ability to create your own custom virtual machines and install your choice of operating system.

Once you have one of those tools installed on your machine, download a FreeBSD 6.2 VMware image from the SourceHosting.net BitTorrent tracker. You can find detailed instructions on setting up the VMware image in a subsequent blog posting.

The OS install is configured as follows:

• Root user has no password
• Networking is configured with DHCP and uses NAT for outbound connections
• Extracted size is 11Gb
• FreeBSD ports tree is installed in /usr/ports and is current as of 01/30/08
• Latest security patches as of 01/17/08 have been applied

Extract the downloaded file somewhere on your drive and fire up VMware Player or VMware Server and follow the prompts to start the VM.

In case you’re new to FreeBSD, there’s a wealth of information in the Handbook. After you’ve logged in and had a look around, you can use the following command to shut the VM down cleanly:

/sbin/shutdown -p now

Look for a new post soon describing how to install each of the PHP frameworks.

Hello everyone,

I recently created a FreeBSD port for each of the following PHP frameworks:

• CakePHP (stable)
• CakePHP (development)
• CodeIgniter
• PRADO
• Zend Framework

I originally started with the Zend Framework port a while back, thinking I would use it to rebuild the SourceHosting.net web site. Since I want all software on the SourceHosting.net FreeBSD servers to be installed and upgraded using the ports system, I had to build the ZF port first. The only problem with building a port is that it doesn’t always require you to learn the ins and outs of actually using the software that you are porting.

The web site rebuilding project is still in the planning phases, and now that I’ve created ports for some additional PHP frameworks, I thought it might be useful to put together a simple web site using each one. I’ve read a lot of comments about each one, the strong points and weaknesses, but I think a hands-on experiment with each one will help a lot to narrow down the final choice.

A slightly more advanced “Hello, world.” program than the one in my original dog-eared copy of K&R ought to make the final choice easy to make. I’ll post progress here, and send any comments you have along the way.