Many web applications are hosted on Linux servers, making it difficult for those who are developing their applications on MS Windows (I know, shame on us!).  It can be a bit tricky and cumbersome to maintain two different environments for development and production.

There is a simple alternative, Virtualisation (or Virtualization ). Developers can set up a virtual machine running the same OS and software that their production server is using.  This reduces the likelihood of a configuration conflict and simplifies development and testing.

The following steps explain how I setup a Ubuntu JeOS VM to run a Django web application on Apache/mod-python. I am not saying its the best way (I’m not an expert) but it works fine for me. Feel free to offer any suggestions as to how I could improve this setup. (BTW thanks to Gareth for helping me set this up). Continue reading →