WordPress development has come a very long way in recent years when it comes to tooling. In the past, developing a WordPress website required some sort of MAMP/WAMP localhost setup and almost always, a rather painful headache. Maybe you’re even one of those developers who developed their website on a live environment – I was.
Luckily, times have changed and there are now tools that help take the headache and repetitiveness out of building WordPress sites on your computer.
In December last year, after 3 years of being almost completely devoid of any WordPress development, I became a full time WordPress developer again. Before that 3 year stint in the payments industry, I was a full time WordPress contractor.
Being out of an industry for 3 years, gave me a unique perspective on how fast things change in computing and more specifically, web development. WordPress development is no exception.
You see, when I returned to WordPress development in December last year, I decided to look at setting up the perfect WordPress development environment. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the tooling around WordPress had advanced so much that it was much like trading in a Ford for a Ferrari.
I was excited, and still am of course, to explore all the tools and in today’s article I’m going to share with you a summary of what I have learned. Hopefully it will help you tweak your current environment and implement some of the tools that are available to you.
It Starts with the Server
To begin with, the most important piece in the WordPress development environment puzzle is the server. Without a server, we can’t do anything.
There are so many different options available today to host WordPress websites on your local environment that it gets tricky to know which one to use.
I’m going to suggest that you drop MAMP/WAMP/XAMP and start using a virtualized development environment.
Why? There are so many reasons:
- It’s an isolated environment. By using a virtualized environment you’re creating a development server that is isolated from your host operating system. You can install whatever operating system you like on the virtual machine and start/stop/restart it without affecting your host. It’s easy to tear down once you’re done with development and no longer need it.
- Messed something up? No problem! Just rebuild the environment. I’m sure we’ve all been in the sticky situation where we’ve tinkered with our server settings and blew stuff up. This is easily fixed by rebuilding the virtual environment or simply using snapshots. So now you can play around and tweak your settings without fear of failure.
- As close to live as you can get. You can literally replicate your live environment on your localhost if you wanted. Having these two environments exactly the same helps with debugging, tweaking and even deployment.
- You can run multiple different server environments, on a single computer. Have one client using Apache and another Nginx? No problem, create those two different environments in virtual machines and you’re good to go.
- Unified environment across development teams. If everyone on a development team uses the exact same setup, it speeds up development time and there are less questions about why something is not working on x person’s machine.
Now that you’re sold on …….
Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/ultimate-wordpress-development-environment/