Can you install a Reddit clone site on a Virtual Machine?

Question

I'd like to set up a Reddit clone website. I see this: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/wiki/reddit-install-script-for-Ubuntu

I'm not used to servers or anything. Is this line

We recommend using a dedicated environment (such as a VM) with at least 4GB of RAM

saying that you can use a virtualmachine (like on VirtualBox) as a server to install the reddit clone and permanently host the site via that virtualmachine? or how does this all work?

I have experience making websites in terms of jQuery, CSS, and HTML, but I don't know how to just set up sites in this regard.

Answer 1

Yes. Virtualbox is a Virtual Machine, so that should work.

That said, I am not convinced Virtualbox is a great solution if you are wanting something scalable and robust - generally people think of Amazon EC2 instances or equivalent, VMware or KVM for virtualization.

In reality anything that can run Ubuntu 14.04 should work (of-course, Ubuntu has moved on from that and no one should be running 14.04 anymore... Its probably worth trying the install on Ubuntu 20.04 and see if that works)

I expect the idea here is to run the system in a sandbox so that if its hacked nothing else can be infected. The statements made would give me pause before using this software - its implied that it is not very secure (but this could be reading too much between the lines)