Chapter 1. Setting Up the Environment

You are about to start a journey—a long one, in which you will learn how to write web applications with PHP. However, first, you need to set up your environment, something that has proven to be tricky at times. This task includes installing PHP 7, the language of choice for this book; MySQL, the database that we will use in some chapters; Nginx, the web server that will allow us to visualize our applications with a browser; and Composer, the favorite PHP dependencies management tool. We will do all of this with Vagrant and also on three different platforms: Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu.

In this chapter, you will learn about:

• Using Vagrant to set up a development environment
• Setting up your environment manually on the main platforms