The aim of this guide is to get from a blank machine to a working development setup in the fewest, simplest steps possible. For the developer who just wants to get the development infrastructure out-of-the-way so they can start to focus on the substance of Drupal 8, the following guide may help that person achieve a high level of performance, including the ultimate challenge, break pointing and step debugging a failing unit test, with a minimum of investment.
There are a ton of different solutions out there for setting up a development environment for working on Drupal 8. The volume of buzzwords alone can be overwhelming. By narrowly focusing on a specific set of tools, this sub-section tries to provide a baseline. It is not restricted to those who choose to run this particular configuration natively on bare metal. It can also be run on any Operating System / Machine combination able to run a virtual machine, such as VirtualBox or VMWare. Simply replace the physical installation media with the installer ISO image attached to a virtual machine and the exact same steps can be followed.