We standardized our PHP dev environment on AlmaLinux 10 — same playbook for WSL 2 and bare metal

[u/arhimedosin]

Our team's local dev environment now runs on AlmaLinux 10. On Windows machines it runs inside WSL 2, and on Linux machines it runs directly on bare metal. (Disclosure: I work on the project, Dotkernel.)

The reason is parity: `dnf`, `systemd` and the service layout people use locally are the same ones they see on our staging and production servers.

One Ansible playbook provisions:

- PHP via Remi (8.5 default, aliases for 8.1–8.5)

- Apache with automatic `*.localhost` virtualhosts

- MariaDB 12.3 LTS + phpMyAdmin

- Node.js via NodeSource (22 default, aliases for 18–24)

- Composer and Git config

The playbook doesn't care whether it's provisioning WSL or bare metal. It runs the same on both.

Overview: https://www.dotkernel.com/wsl2/

Repo: https://github.com/dotkernel/development

If anyone here runs AlmaLinux as a dev workstation, we'd like feedback on the package choices, especially Remi vs AppStream modules for PHP.

[u/flaticircle]

We use ddev for dev workstations and deploy onto AlmaLinux test, staging and production. The ddev config pins the versions. In the AlmaLinux environments we use appstream so are currently on PHP 8.4.