Guest Additions: Installation, Sharing Folders

Guest Additions is a set of drivers and utilities that improve integration and increase performance between the host and virtual machines. They help with sharing folders, seamless mouse integration, clipboard sharing, and improving video support. For a more complete list of benefits, please see the official documentation.

You install Guest Additions on a virtual machine after installing a guest operating system.

Please see this article on VirtualBox for:

Why Do You Need Guest Additions in Web Development?

You need them to efficiently share your project folder between the host and virtual machines.

This is important, especially if you are working on a web project in PhpStorm:

In the past, I contacted PhpStorm technical support and asked about the best way to work on a PHP project:

  1. Should I keep the project in a folder on the host machine and share it with a virtual machine?
  2. Or should I keep the project on the VM and share it with the host machine?

They told me not to keep the project on any kind of network share. Instead, you should keep your project folder on the host machine and share it with the virtual machine. Or you could have performance problems in PhpStorm.

I tried both approaches. And I can confirm their advice: the project files should be on the host machine. The other way, the IDE's performance was pretty bad for me.

Maybe there are exceptions to this rule. But I always keep project files on the host machine.

I think the best way to share your project folder with the virtual machine is through Guest Additions.

In this article, you can find:

Please also see the official documentation.

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