BitNami - Full Stack Infrastructure and Applications

Installing Drupal or Joomla, Wordpress, phpBB or Moodle is not such a big task. However, first you need to have an environment set up on which to install it. Windows or Linux, Apache, MySQL (or PostGre) and PHP (or Ruby or the JDK/JRE). Each one installed one-by-one, each one taking a little bit more of your time to install and configure. Environment variables, hostnames to be set, configuration files to be edited - it might take you a few hours, or even a few working days.

You can speed things up by installing WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP), LAMP (Linux, etc.) or even MAMP or SAMP (Mac, Solaris), as dictated by your OS. XAMPP is another option. This will give you a full stack infrastructure that you can install applications on and will really save you time. But why not download a full stack infrastructure with an application install of your choice thrown in?



Cue http://bitnami.org/, who will give you just that. A slipstreamed installer for an ever increasing number of apps, and the infrastructure of your choice on which to host them.

I was looking for the latest version of Drupal, and BitNami had version 6.9-0, which is pretty impressive, since the latest is 6.10, so it's pretty close. But there's Joomla (which I installed on my painstakingly built stack just 2 weeks ago - before I stumbled upon BitNami), Moodle (eLearning), Wordpress (blogging), JasperServer (portal app), MediaWiki and phpBB (the premiere bulletin board app) all there for you to install and use as you see fit.

Develop, host, and build a production site if you want. You can even install Drupal, Subversion and, say, phpBB on the same native server. Keep the installed app(s) running, and each subsequent application installer checks for ports in use and prompts you to select a free port to listen on. They really have thought of everything.


So you have no excuse. It's easier than ever and you can even install them on Vista. You can even install several on VMware images if you want to spare your native OS. Best of all, it doesn't cost a penny and will cost you very little of your precious time.