10 best Linux apps for web development

Last Updated on May 22, 2024 by Jhonni Jets

As a web developer, you need powerful yet easy-to-use tools to design, code, test, and publish websites and web applications. Linux is a highly customizable and secure operating system that supports a huge number of open source and cross-platform apps ideal for all aspects of web development. This article will overview 10 of the best Linux apps for tasks like coding, debugging, version control, and more.

1. Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a lightweight yet powerful source code editor made by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and MacOS. It provides support for debugging, task running, and version control. Its simplicity and extensibility have made it one of the most popular code editors. VS Code has a clean and customizable interface and supports hundreds of programming languages including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, C++ and more through extensions. It also has a built-in Terminal and support for version control systems like Git. VS Code’s intuitive features like syntax highlighting, auto-completion, linting and code formatting make it an ideal tool for web development on Linux.

2. Sublime Text

Sublime Text is a highly customizable, feature-rich and cross-platform text editor focused on speed. While not free like VS Code, its trial version is fully functional and allows unlimited use. Sublime Text has an intuitive interface and loads files almost instantly even large ones. It supports over 80 programming languages and has a powerful plugin system. Useful plugins for web developers include Emmet for writing code faster, HTMLPrettify for formatting HTML, CSSFormat for beautifying CSS and Git for version control integration. Sublime Text also provides helpful features like multiple selections, real-time syntax checking, code snippets and an embedded terminal.

3. Atom

Atom is a hackable text editor developed by GitHub and freely available on Linux, Mac and Windows. It is extremely customizable through its package manager and offers plenty of extensions for web development. Popular Atom packages include atom-beautify for formatting code, emmet for increased coding speed, linter for syntax errors and git-plus for Git integration. Just like VS Code, Atom also provides syntax highlighting, auto-completion, multiple selections and an integrated terminal. Its simplistic yet feature-rich interface along with regular updates have made Atom one of the best code editors for Linux. It also allows developers to create their own packages and themes to extend its functionality.

4. PHPStorm

PHPStorm is a feature-packed and knowledgeable IDE tailored specifically for PHP, HTML and JavaScript development. It offers deep integration with PHP frameworks like Symfony, Laravel and Yii. PHPStorm provides intelligent code completion, error detection, debugging, version control and deployment tools. Some of its key features include on-the-fly code analysis, refactoring, unit testing, profiling and support for web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and more. Its robust debugging capabilities allow setting breakpoints and evaluating expressions while debugging. PHPStorm also integrates well with servers for deploying and testing web apps remotely. While not free, PHPStorm is worth considering for serious PHP development on Linux.

5. IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA is the powerful software behind PHPStorm and provides all its features along with support for other programming languages as well. IntelliJ IDEA supports full-featured development for Java, JavaScript, PHP and various frameworks. It has on-the-fly code quality inspections, automated refactoring tools and intelligent code completion. IntelliJ IDEA allows debugging web apps straight from the editor as well as remote development workflows. Other handy features include version control, Git integration, terminal sessions and Vagrant/Docker support. While resource-intensive, IntelliJ IDEA is highly configurable and customizable through plugins. It offers a robust IDE experience for multi-language web development on Linux.

6. PyCharm

PyCharm is the preferred IDE for Python and web development with popular frameworks like Django. It provides intelligent code completion, powerful code navigation and analysis features for Python and web-related technologies. PyCharm assists with common tasks like debugging, testing, deployment and version control. Its debugger allows stepping through code, evaluating expressions, viewing variables and more. PyCharm also eases web development workflows through features like live editing, Emmet support, integrated Git and database tools. For Python web frameworks like Django, it provides auto-complete for templates, models, views and more. PyCharm is an indispensable IDE for any serious Python or Django based web project on Linux.

7. Node.js

Node.js is a powerful and popular JavaScript runtime environment used for building scalable network applications and web servers. It allows building web sites, apps, APIs and IoT projects using JavaScript on the server-side. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model making it lightweight and efficient. The Node Package Manager (NPM) has an enormous library ecosystem for all development needs. Node.js makes websites highly responsive, scalable and real-time. Popular Node.js frameworks like Express and Koa benefit from its asynchronous nature. When combined with build tools like Gulp or Webpack, Node.js streamlines web development workflows on Linux.

8. Composer

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP that allows defining and installing dependencies for PHP projects. It manages libraries and frameworks like Symfony, Drupal, Craft CMS etc for PHP projects, ensuring consistent and isolated versions between environments. Composer reduces the time spent on installing and configuring PHP dependencies manually. It also resolves dependency conflicts of third party packages. Other benefits include lock files for locking dependencies, creating and installing packages and script automation. Composer is an essential tool for any PHP based web application on Linux, improving the development and deployment process significantly.

9. Yarn

Yarn is a package manager for JavaScript and front-end projects. It installs dependencies from a package registry like NPM but is faster, more reliable and offers offline capabilities. Yarn resolves weaknesses in NPM related to performance, security and determinism. It ensures developers and teams get exactly the same dependency tree resulting in fewer bugs and higher quality code. Yarn lockfiles lock dependencies versions which is important when working with teams. It helps maintain React, Vue, Angular and other JavaScript projects and packages in Linux command line. Yarn helps web developers manage client-side packages effortlessly alongside Composer for server-side dependency management.

10. Browser DevTools

All major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari come prepackaged with rich DevTools for web development. Their tools allow inspecting pages, debugging JavaScript, auditing performance, emulating mobile views and more directly from the browser. DevTools empower front-end web developers with capabilities like modification of live DOM trees, inline editing of CSS/JS files, event listener breakpoints, network throttling and profiling abilities. They provide an integrated debugging experience without requiring additional software. Browser DevTools continue to innovate and add features useful for web testing and debugging workflows on Linux based development systems.

 

Conclusion:

In conclusion, Linux offers developers an excellent ecosystem of powerful yet lightweight open source tools for building sophisticated websites and applications. The flexibility of Linux also allows configuring IDEs, code editors, build systems and other tools according to individual preferences. Choosing the right set of developer-friendly apps can optimize workflows and boost productivity when working on web projects from Linux desktops and servers.