Magento On The Move

I like to keep my personal development environments on a USB drive, because i spend a lot of time on computers other than my own (mostly because of business trips).

So I felt the need to try to create a Magento portable environment.

This is as simple as using EasyPHP. It contains Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin.
It is by itself portable, so all you need to do is copy the root folder to your USB drive. When run, it detects that it was launched in a different directory and updates all configuration.

If you want to develop as well as having a running copy, all you need to do is to download Eclipse for PHP. It can be run on the USB drive as well.

On The Move

I like to keep my personal development environments on a USB drive, because i spend a lot of time on computers other than my own (mostly because of business trips).

Also you never know when you'll need some tools on a computer with no internet connection, or where you can't install software.

So I use Portable Apps ().

To be even more portable, I download only the applications and extract the the USB drive, so no PortableApps executable necessary.

But I also carry installations to some of the applications I consider essential in case I need to share them (as with family asking to the IT guy to fix something).

Here are some of my toolkit apps:

[Install]
- ARDC Data Recovery Tools (Data Recovery Tools);
- AVG (Anti-virus);
- Combined Community Codec Pack (Codec Pack);
- daemon408-x86 (ISO reader, but can't install on Win7 :( );

[Portable]
- KeePass (Password Database) ;
- GIMP (Image Editor);
- Notepad++ (Text Editor);
- PeaZip (Archive Manager);
- SumatraPDF (PDF Viewer);
- VLC Video (Video Player);

[Runs without Installation]
- ExamDiff;
- Reflector (.NET);

Android On The Move

I like to keep my personal development environments on a USB drive, because i spend a lot of time on computers other than my own (mostly because of business trips).

So I felt the need to create an Android portable environment.
You can't build this environment on-the-fly, that is, without an initial installation. Most software will be 'stolen' from their original locations.

Sadly, i still only work on Windows (to lazy to spend more time on Linux), so i probably won't be able to help if you need to do the same on Linux (but probably it's not that different from what I did).

So here are the steps I managed so far:

1 - JDK
I'm using jdk1.6.0_20 (the latest at the time). I've downloaded and copied the jdk1.6.0_20 folder to my USB drive. A copy will be enough, after a little configuration.

2 - Eclipse
I'm using 3.5 (Galileo). Also just needed a simply copy of the root folder to the USB drive.

3 - Android SDK
I'm using revisions 6 (for Eclair) and 7 (for Froyo). You should download all the targets necessary before copying the folders. Then, you'll need to copy the root folder (android-sdk-windows) to your USB drive.

4 - AVD (Emulators)
To debug we need an emulator that will run our app. Unfortunately, it needs to be created beforehand on a fixed environment. So, all we have do is to copy the *.avd folder to our .android/avd folder.
AVD uses .ini files to configure target platform and installation path. As this has to be a full path and can't have shell variables, I chose to reconfigure that path in the batch file used to start-up eclipse.

5 - Batch file
To boot the environment we need to indicate to eclipse where to find the virtual machine and the sdk tools. So I start my environment with this script:

REM Updates AVD path config
type "%CD%\.android\avd\[sample].ini" | find /v "path=" > "%CD%\.android\avd\[sample].tmp"
copy /y "%CD%\.android\avd\[sample].tmp" "%CD%\.android\avd\[sample].ini"
echo path=%CD%\.android\avd\[sample].avd>>"%CD%\.android\avd\[sample].ini"
del "%CD%\.android\avd\[sample].tmp"

REM Defines Android home directory (defaults to the users' home directory)
SET ANDROID_SDK_HOME=%CD%

REM Defines path to swt.jar (not sure if necessary)
SET ANDROID_SWT=%CD%\android-sdk-windows\tools\lib\x86

REM -data "." defines the workspace path to load
REM -vm defines the path to the virtual machine
.\eclipseJava\eclipse.exe -data "." -vm".\jdk1.6.0_20\bin\javaw"

This should be enough to allow you to take your Android developments everywere.