It seems to me it is always a good idea to have a virtual machine for development. And it seems I am not the first and only to think about it, which tends to validate the approach…
There are many approaches to this, and my preferred is using Vagrant. There are a lot of tutorials (here, [here][vagrant2] or [here][vagrant3]), and I am not going to make yet another one. One of my current hackish occupation is to develop a Django website, using a Postgres/nginx/supervisor/Django1.7/Python3 stack (yeah, a classic now). Actually, I am stretching myself since I left Django at version 1.4 with Python 2. It takes me time, and I do not want to mess with my laptop. So a VM seems the perfect way.
However, for some reason, I cannot get my prefered browser, with all its tools (Chrome) working properly under this VM (VirtualBox). Or IE11 as well for what it’s worth. Thus I was looking for a virtualizing my environment and came up with this [vagrant box][my_vagrant] of a Debian Wheezy 7.6 image with the aforementioned stack. It suits me quite well for developing apps for Django. You can check out the README for customizing it to your needs.
[vagrant3]:
[my_vagrant]