Earlier this week, I wrote up a tutorial about how to make a testing environment for Joomla on the windows platform. I went through the instructions of setting up WAMP, making the database, and installing and configuring Joomla. It turns out there’s a much easier way to create a testing environment for Joomla, Magento, MySQL, Lamp, Moodle, WordPress, and all sorts of other open source software from a company called JumpBox.

Essentially, they’ll give you an image of a virtual machine that contains the web-server software, as well as the server-side software you are testing. Everything will be pre-configured and ready to go. You’ll download a copy of the virtual machine, get it running with VirtualBox, and you’re good to go. Some of the virtual machines do cost money, but fortunately for us, the image for Joomla is free for download from Joomla.org.

Normally, I’d post a walk through of going through the process of installing the software and getting it up and going, but the folks at Joomla.org have already done that for us:

Run Joomla in 5 min with JumpBox and VirtualBox from Sean Tierney on Vimeo.