Proper development environment for Symfony2 Windows/Linux

Ok so this is what I came up with...

• I am sharing the application folder in Linux via CIFS and mounting it as a drive on Windows using a Host-Only network adapter so I don't have to worry about changing connections.
• I disabled the graphical interface to save resources
• I am using VBoxVMService (http://vboxvmservice.sourceforge.net/) to start the VM automatically as a service so I don't have to be opening VirtualBox
• Using Putty as my terminal
• on Symfony, I am overriding the getCacheDir() and getLogDir() on the AppKernel and throwing those off to another folder which is not in the shared folder.

I have spent a whole day working on 4 applications (that's 4 PhpStorm instances opened) and it has been working just fine. The only time it is slow is when you first add the project that the IDE has to index everything.

I'll leave this here in case it helps anyone else or anyone else has any additional comments.

I have really the same problem like you... I have to use a Windows system for my main work but want to develop my PHP-based projects on the same configuration like the target - because in the past I experienced a lot of different behavior betweet PHP/Win & PHP/Linux.

In the past I successfully used VBox with mounting my work folder via SMB or VBOXSF. But then came the first Symfony projects with their thousands of files and folders and this setup became nearly unusable. Currently I migrated that dev-VM to Hyper-V but this only supports mounting over network.Perhaps VMware is faster!?? But there´s the catch: I can´t use vmware because I want to use docker for windows.... and they exclude each other.

Sad to say that this also eliminates easy Vagrant dev setups.

Docker for Windows (Hyper-V) and Docker Machine (VBox) are no better :-( Thats extremely sad because I really like easy repeatable setups and use Docker also on some (small) prod systems.

Then I saw the WSL Linux subsystem called "bash for windows" and thougt... that has to be the solution.... but nope. It´s even worse in IO than mounting a CIFS folder over network - see https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-7900x-wsl&num=2Even on just installing the machine I experienced how slow the IO is and didn´t even finish the setup.

Currently I´m stuck with a dual boot setup which really pixxes me. I waste my time rebooting. I have to use a notebook and several drivers are not working correctly, external displays... USB-ports etc. wich is the main reason for me to NOT switch completely to Linux and use Win as VM.I think I´ll give WAMP another try... or I´ll have to use a second developer machine.