I want to try using a LAMP stack with ubuntu on WSL2 on my Windows 10 machine for local development.
I don’t want to manage MySQL and PHP versions and vhosts, apache modules etc. by hand. I was very happy with WAMPserver on Windows and I’m looking for an equivalent tool for ubuntu on WSL2.
What I particularly appreciate in WAMPserver is that everything comes pre-installed and pre-configured, and the program takes care of creating new vhosts, etc. as needed, no need to do anything in the Windows hosts file, etc. It just works directly out of the box. Also, changing PHP or MySQL versions takes just a mouseclick, for example I can click database->mysql 5.6 and then PHP version->5.56, services-> restart and it’s done. Or activating and deactivating Apache modules, setting PHP parameters, etc.
Is Virtualmin a good option for that?
Then, I guess I want to try out Virtualmin anyway - is there a how-to somewhere with instructions about how to use it with that local scenario?
i.e. how to setup virtualmin to manage a localhost, and how to use it?
install Ubuntu server on VirtualBox and install virtualmin on it. Of course you need to create secondary Network adapter for the Virtual machine and set VirtualMin IP to the new network adapter in order to access to the Virtualmin from browser.
Ubuntu 20.04 is not yet supported by the installer. But, you probably can’t use the installer, anyway, because it expects to make a bunch of system level changes that are likely impossible in WSL.
You probably want to just fire up a VM running your preferred supported Linux distro (20.04 is in development, probably supported in the next few days, but we’re still working on it, so no real firm date). That way you can have an environment that matches your deployment environment.
WAMP is probably still the right choice for someone wanting to run all these things on Windows. We don’t do any development or testing for Windows (or WSL), and since it is basically never used on servers (and since we don’t have any interest in being Windows developers unless there were a lot of money in it) we don’t have any plans to do so.
Edit: I think I should probably be more emphatic that the Virtualmin installer is very disruptive. It shouldn’t be run on your workstation, at all, even if it’s a supported system. A manual installation (just installing Webmin and Virtualmin virtual-server module) might make sense if you just want to use it for managing local websites and databases for development. But, the full stack is wildly inappropriate on a workstation. I mean, you don’t want a full mail stack on your laptop unless you’re a mail stack developer.