Any good resources on setting up an ubuntu virtual machine for web development?

Question

I'm currently on my placement year at uni with 4 months left. Before working at my current place, I have not used a nix environment for web development and have used WAMP. Over the past year I have found some very interesting new tech that requires a bit more than my shared hosting even to play with (eg node.js, RoR 3). At work we use a Virtual Machine for development, but that's all been set up and configured to match the live servers, and is managed with a Puppet server. Are there any really good resources for setting up and configuring an Ubuntu VM as a web server? Work currently uses Ubuntu so I would assume this is a good OS to use. I do of course know how to use google, but the noise ratio is just too big, so thought I'd ask here, as I know many of you will have a ton of bookmarks.

Cheers.

Answer 1

I would suggest you look into Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/) and VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/). Create a base Ubuntu image and recycle it easily with Vagrant. In this way you can spin up pristine environments with ease.

Answer 2

Company called slicehost have a really nice set of tutorials / howto articles on setting up servers with different nix distros. Many awesome articles from Slicehost

Answer 3

Howtoforge.com has hundreds, if not thousands, of step by step guides to setting up all types of Linux distrbutions. Do a search for "ubuntu perfect server".