6 Must-Know Sys-Admin How-Tos for Web Developers

The ability to develop software productively requires the ability to manage your development, test and production environments. Managing a production environment is best left to a professional, trained system administrator. But managing a development environment is something that most developers like to do themselves because it gives them the flexibility to set it up however they like.

This can become a tremendous time sync however if you’re working on multiple projects in parallel, each of which requires a slightly different development environment. Settings and configurations can conflict. Without the know-how to quickly tweak settings and modify your environment you’ll end up losing many hours to figuring out how to just get a working development environment.

How-Tos

Export and import a MySQL database in one step

Use mysqldump to export the file and mysql to import it. Pipe the output of a into b and you’ve copied your database from servera to serverb.

mysqldump -uroot -prootpassword -hservera a_database | mysql -uroot -prootpassword -hserverb a_database

Securely Copy a File from a Linux Server to your Workstation

* Requires a *nix shell on both ends.

scp me@server:/path/to/file local.file.name

Set up a local Apache Virtual Host

Be sure you have this fragment in your Apache config somewhere before including your virtual host config file (which in recent versions of Apache is included via files other than httpd.conf.

NameVirtualHost *:80

Then add the snippet below wherever your virtual-hosts are defined (can be anywhere inside your configuration, but is often done on Linux via sites-available/sites-enabled and other times via /path/to/apache/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf.

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName appname.local
  DocumentRoot /path/to/app
  <Directory /path/to/app>
    Options All
    AllowOverride All
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

After making this change you’ll need to restart Apache (see how) and map the new hostname (see how).

Then point your browser to http://appname.local/ and you’re in business.

Restart Apache

On *nix (including OSX):

sudo apache2ctl graceful

On Windows

Either restart the Apache2 service (see: How to Restart a Windows Service).

Restart a Windows Service

1. Right-click “My Computer”
2. Click “Manage”
3. Click “Services” under “Services and Applications”
4. Select the service you want to restart and click “Restart”

Map a virtual host name to localhost

To get http://app.local to point to your local machine:

On *nix

Add the following to /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 app.local

On Windows

Add the following to C:/Windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 app.local

Conclusion

There are countless individual, simple tasks which you’ll need to perform over and over as a developer. These are just a few that I use more than others. So take these, put them in your bag of tricks and build great apps. Enjoy!