You’ll have a choice between the latest version and a “Long Term Support” version choose the LTS version because it’ll be more stable.

Download Ubuntu Server from the Ubuntu downloads page.

Run the installer, and follow the directions onscreen.

(Yes, you can run Linux as a virtual machine within Linux it’s actually beneficial in many circumstances.)

Download VirtualBox for your host OS (Windows, Mac, or Linux) from the VirtualBox downloads page.

Download VirtualBox & Ubuntu Serverįirst we need to download and install VirtualBox itself, followed by a Linux installer. Your desktop or laptop is going to be the host system, and we’re going to create a guest system to run Linux on. Think of it as a computer within a computer. We’re going to create a virtual machine to run a Linux server on. These directions are available as a video workshop to our Pro students, but we thought we’d share the basic ingredients here as well so you can experiment with Linux servers yourself!

This is a great way to try things out because it lets you copy the server to try out different configurations, take snapshots you can roll back to if you make a mistake, and more. So we figured out a setup that mimics a Linux server running out on the Internet somewhere -which is where you’d typically deploy web apps to -but uses VirtualBox to run the server as a virtual machine on your development system. We’re prepping a workshop series for our Pro students on deploying web apps to production, and we wanted a simple, safe way for students to follow along at home, without having to create an account on AWS / DigitalOcean / etc.

Ubuntu server vm