VMWare Workstation integration with Zend Studio

Question

I've been trying to work out if it's worth paying for VMware Workstation and to use VM's for testing and debugging my PHP applications before deploying them. I develop on Windows and have problems when deploying to Linux in the past. I've downloaded and installed the trial for VMWare Workstation and have installed a guest Ubuntu with Zend Server running in it. I've installed the VMware tools in the guest and can successfully access Zend Server from a browser in the host OS. I've been through all of the steps in Zend Studio to set up the run and debug settings for a test file including setting up the mapping for the code files for the project. However, every time I try to run a PHP file in the VM from Zend Studio I get a 404 error from the server. I'm not deploying to the VM but Zend Studio is supposed to take care of all of that for me by just sending the files as needed. Has anyone got this integration to work and have I missed any steps?

Answer 1

I worked this out finally with some help from a friend. Buried deep in the Zend Studio documentation is a section on creating your own Virtual Appliance for testing in a VM. The vital step was that once the VM is created I needed to change the web servers document root from /var/www to /mnt/hgfs. This means that any files that are published from the host OS to the guest OS appear in the document root of the server and can therefore be found. Moral of story for me: always RTM, even if the info needed is buried...

Thanks for the help and suggestions on this.

Answer 2

I think VMWare has a free version but if not you can always try virtual box.

I have a pc running ubuntu and that's where I do all my programming (mostly php) but I also have some virtual machines on my laptop.