

Does OS Really Matter for PHP Development? - chintan39


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Someone1234
For PHP development? No. However it can be useful to have the development
machine match the expected deployment machine so you can spot bugs earlier.

Windows and UNIX-like systems in particular handle files very differently and
understanding the edge cases (e.g. what can filenames contain character wise?)
can be important.

I'd say that Linux is by far the most popular PHP host, however Windows
desktop might be the most popular development platform.

~~~
krapp
I have been bitten at least once for forgetting that Linux and Windows
disagree on the case sensitivity of filenames and directories when dealing
with namespacing in PHP...

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switch007
In what sense? Matching dev to prod? If so, I think the question ought to be:
what justification is there for not matching prod?

I know some devs like their Windows desktops. That's fine. But it's 2014 and
we have nice things like virtualisation, vagrant, containers, puppet and
ansible.

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edoceo
Hardly, however there are a few routines that only function properly on Linux,
such as syslog(), one or two of the date formatting libs. The cause: these
routines depend on system libraries for functionality which don't exist on
Windows.

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saluki
I would recommend OS X for PHP.

Things just work better on a mac for development. This is true for Rails and
PHP development. Things just never seem to work as easily on windows.

I would also recommend checking out Laravel and using Laravel Homestead
(Vagrant) for development also check Laravel Forge for deployment.

[https://laracasts.com/lessons/introducing-laravel-
homestead](https://laracasts.com/lessons/introducing-laravel-homestead)

Laracasts is a great place to learn the Laravel Framework. Jeremy uses a mac
so using OS X makes the tutorials easier.

