Installing VirtualBox (4.2) and phpVirtualBox (4.2.4) on headless Ubuntu Server (12.04 LTS)

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server is a headless server and does not have X-Window, therefore phpVirtualBox is needed to manage VirtualBox. There are two steps covered here in this post; one for instaling Virtualbox 4.2.4 and the other one for installing phpVirtualbox 4.2.4 (the most current version at the time of writing this post).

Step 1. Installing VirtualBox 4.2

• Download the Oracle public key for apt-secure and register it as below:
  • wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add –
• Add VirtualBox repository to Ubuntu’s package resource list and update it
  • sudo sh -c ‘echo “deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian precise contrib” >> /etc/apt/sources.list’
  • sudo apt-get update
• Install VirtualBox 4.2
  • sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.2
• Add a local user to the “vboxusers” group for using VirtualBox
  • sudo adduser <your-local-user> vboxusers
• Create a config file for VirtualBox under “/etc/default” and add the local user as a VirtualBox web service user
  • sudo nano /etc/default/virtualbox
  • Locate the line starting with “VBOXWEB_USER” and change it as below
    • VBOXWEB_USER=<your-local-user>
• Download and install the VirtualBox Extension Pack for the remote desktop connection to the virtual machines
  • wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.4/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.2.4-81684.vbox-extpack
  • VBoxManage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.2.4-81684.vbox-extpack

Step 2. Installing phpVirtualBox 4.2.4

• Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, Php) components (keep the ‘^’ at the end)
  • sudo apt-get install lamp-server^
  • Check the web server installation
    • http://localhost
  • Check the PHP installion
    • echo “<?php phpinfo(); ?>” | sudo tee /var/www/testing.php
    • http://localhost/testing.php
• Download phpVirtualBox according to the installed VirtualBox version (4.2)
  • wget https://phpvirtualbox.googlecode.com/files/phpvirtualbox-4.2-4.zip
• Unzip the contents of the phpvirtualbox-4.2.4.zip
  • unzip phpvirtualbox-4.2-4.zip
  • (If unzip is not installed: sudo apt-get install unzip)
• Create a directory for phpVirtualBox under “/var/www” and copy the contents of unzipped phpvirtualbox-4.2.4.zip there
  • sudo mkdir /var/www/phpvirtualbox
  • sudo cp -R phpvirtualbox-4.2-4/* /var/www/phpvirtualbox
• Prepare the phpVirtualBox config file
  • sudo cp /var/www/phpvirtualbox/config.php-example /var/www/phpvirtualbox/config.php
• Enter the local user’s credential to the “$username” and “$password” fields in the config file
  • var $username = ‘<your-local-user>’
  • var $password = ‘<your-local-user-pass>’
• Start the VirtualBox web service
  • sudo /etc/init.d/vboxweb-service start
• Restart the server
  • sudo shutdown -r now
• Connect to the web interface of phpVirtualBox
  • http://localhost/phpvirtualbox
    • username: admin
    • password: admin

That’s the whole process to get phpVirtualBox work properly along with VirtualBox. I hope it also worked for you.