WordPress Development Environment

The Types of Local Environment

There are numerous different options available for local development environments. These environments generally fall into one of the following buckets:

  1. Traditional XAMPP – Runs the server on one’s native machine. These solutions have been around the longest, oftentimes aren’t WP specific.
  2. New XAMPP – These tend to be WP specific, may include a slick UI, and generally hide more of the implementation details (e.g. one doesn’t see as much of the servers running on one’s system in day-to-day use).
  3. Vagrant/Virtual Machine – Use a full VM, usually managed by Vagrant to make provisioning quicker. This solution has been around for quite some time and tends to be simpl(ish) to implement.
  4. Docker/Container – Unsurprisingly, WP has seen a significant interest in using the massively popular container ecosystem. This is similar to using Vagrant/Virtual Machine, but tends to be a bit more complex to implement.

Vagrant

Prepackaged, Ready to Go

How To Setup

Roots Bedrock

Docker

Prepackaged

Official WordPress

How To Setup

xAMP(P)

Laravel Valet

Homebrew

Local by Flywheel

DesktopServer

Multiple Platforms

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