How-to: Free Portable Web Development on a USB Drive
Posted by Jon Lee in Efficiency, How-to, Web Development, tags: aptana, firefox, gimp, portable-apps, PuTTY, usb-drive, vim, web development, xampp
Are you obsessed with web development? Want to work on your website from anywhere? Too cheap to buy a laptop to do so? Then this guide is for you!
All you need is a USB drive (the faster the better). It doesn’t have to be huge, even a 256mb drive is enough depending on what you decide to put on it. All of the applications in the list below are free/opensource and do not require any installation. They should work on any Windows computer.
A lot of the following apps are made possible by John T. Haller from PortableApps.com. He takes existing software and optimizes it for USB use by removing local file dependency, registry writes and prolongs drive life by reducing the number of reads/writes. Application names without “Portable” may write to registry or store temporary files locally though it will still run from the USB drive without installation.
HTML Editor
This is the bread and butter of your portable web development drive. As a coder, my first choice is Aptana hands down. Integrated FTP, color coding, tabbed editing – it is basically Dreamweaver without the WYSIWYG interface. Aptana offers a no-installation zip download which is what you’d want. Other candidates for coders include Notepad++ and gVim Portable. For the WYSIWYG web designers out there, there is Nvu Portable, the portable version of the popular Nvu (unfortunately it does not support PHP).
Graphics/Image Editing
If you’re designing a site, you’ll most likely need an image editor. The best choice here is GIMP Portable. GIMP can do most of what Photoshop can do, although the user interface takes some getting used to.
Browser
This one is a no-brainer. Firefox Portable (with appropriate add-ons for web development) takes care of all your browser needs. You can copy over your existing Firefox settings (including addons, bookmarks etc.) to the portable installation by simply copying your profile folder.
Webserver
XAMPP is an Apache/MySQL/PHP web server that doesn’t require installation and can run from anywhere. Now you don’t even need an Internet connection to test your latest MySQL/PHP web 2.0 startup! Personally, I prefer XAMPP Lite as it takes up less space yet still contains everything I need. Note: If you don’t install this to the root of your USB drive, you will need to run setup_xampp.bat before first use.
FTP Program
After you’ve made your site, you’ll need to upload your files via FTP. If FireFTP for Firefox doesn’t do it for you, you can try Filezilla Portable. By the way, did I mention XAMPP Lite comes with an FTP server?
Miscellaneous
PuTTY is a must have for any serious web development. You can use it to SSH into your web server to make quick changes or you can even use it to encrypt all your web traffic. The original stand alone version works, but PuTTY Portable is tweaked for USB drive usage!
What my 1GB Kingmax Super Stick has in the PortableApps directory:
- Aptana (78 mb)
- Firefox Portable with extensions (25 mb)
- XAMPP Lite (113 mb)
- GIMP Portable (24 mb)
- PuTTY Portable (1 mb)
- gVim Portable (17 mb)
Total: 258 megs -leaving plenty of room for web files and other apps.
Now you can be web developing wherever you go!
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