Setting environment for Drupal projects development on the basis of Debian 6

We'll change PHP settings for our work:

drupal@debian6:~$ sudo nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

change parameters:
max_execution_time = 90 (script execution time in seconds)
post_max_size = 32M (maximum size that is transfered by POST requests)
upload_max_filesize = 50M (maximum filesize that can be uploaded, which is very convenient if database is imported through phpmyadmin)
To accelerate work of PHP scripts, install eAccelerator

drupal@debian6:~$ sudo apt-get install build-essential php5-dev

Create category for cache and define permissions for it:

drupal@debian6:~$ sudo mkdir -p /var/cache/eaccelerator
drupal@debian6:~$ sudo chmod 0777 /var/cache/eaccelerator

PHP 5.3 on default is installed with XCache support. For eAccelerator to work appropriately, you must move XCache from modules

drupal@debian6:~$ sudo mv /etc/php5/conf.d/xcache.ini ~/

Restart Apache2

drupal@debian6:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Check if eAccelerator is present in PHP

drupal@debian6:~$ php -v
PHP 5.3.3-7+squeeze1 with Suhosin-Patch (cli) (built: Mar 18 2011 17:22:52) 
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies
    with eAccelerator v0.9.6.1, Copyright (c) 2004-2010 eAccelerator, by eAccelerator
    with Xdebug v2.1.0, Copyright (c) 2002-2010, by Derick Rethans
    with Suhosin v0.9.32.1, Copyright (c) 2007-2010, by SektionEins GmbH

Then we create virtualhost for our project (copy default virtualhost for your site):

drupal@debian6:~$ sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/drupal7
drupal@debian6:~$ sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/drupal7

It should look the following way:

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin webmaster @ localhost
        ServerName drupal7.loc

        DocumentRoot /var/www/drupal7
        <Directory />
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride All 
        </Directory>
        <Directory /var/www/drupal7/>
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All 
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>

        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
        LogLevel warn
        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

We enable our site (make virtualhost active):

drupal@debian6:~$ sudo a2ensite drupal7

Restart Apache2 to activate VirtualHost settings for our site.

drupal@debian6:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

If you work at one computer, you can use /etc/hosts file, where you will link URL of your project to our IP.

drupal@debian6:~$ sudo nano /etc/hosts

Add a line there:

127.0.0.1 drupal7.loc

Then go to /var/www/ and unpack drupal into a folder drupal7 for installation. After we put http://drupal7.loc/ into address line - window of Drupal installation will be opened.

As a result we have an environment on which some time was spent, but now we can do our favorite business of developing projects.