Drupal Development on a Thumb Drive

I mostly a .NET developer but need to do some new work in Drupal.

So I guess I need a portable

- Apache

- PHP

- MySQL

- phpMyAdmin

- Drupal codebase

What is the best way to work with the environment on a portable / thumb drive? I'm on Windows. I want to go portable because I work on 3 to 4 different machines throughout t开发者_如何转开发he week. Is there an equivalent to InstantRails but for PHP/Drupal?

Something I've used in the past is a combination of the portable XAMPP package along with DropBox.

The XAMPP package gives you all the development tools you need. Install it to your DropBox folder and keep the same development copy in sync on your 3 - 4 different machines.

You can install cygwin on your drive. It is self contained, so moving it around is simple. Then simply install the package versions of Apache, MySql and PHP. Once you got that stack up running, installing drupal is just a matter of downloading the newest version, unzip into the web root and follow instructions. PHP is a lot easier to configure than many other stacks.

Best way to get up and running on Windows is to use the [Acquia Drupal stack installer for Windows][1]. You'll have to investigate best options at that point for thumb drive use or machine syncing using Dropbox or LiveMesh. I would probably go with the syncing route rather than with portable thumb drive. I have used Portable Apps XAMP before and was impressed.

[1]: http://Acquia Drupal stack installer for Windows

I recently switch from USBWebserver, which is a completely portable stack that works really well. The only thing missing is a mail service, but I'm sure with enough tinkering, one can get one installed.

I switched to the Acquia Drupal stack simply because of its design. I work almost entirely in Drupal now, so this was ideal. Best of all, email service included. Now if I can just get it portable so I don't have separate databases on each workstation, I'll be good to go. In the meantime, I use Subversion and Dropbox to keep my files in synch. I know, it's overkill to use both, but Dropbox makes sure my "local" copies are synched in case I forget to do a commit.