I use Laragon. It is very fast and testing worh different PHP versions is easy. I have currently 30+ websites running under it, and I use 5 PHP versions for testing. Switching PHP takes 2 seconds. The downside is the interface that is a bit dated and confusing when using for the first time, but it works great. And, it is Windows only.
I used LocalWP, but it is slow, and prone to breaking. They improved it in recent years, but it is still not very good – I use it for few client websites hosted on Flywheel, and websites are slow, switching PHP is often not working, and Apache to Ngnix switching never works as expected. Sync with Flywheel is the only thing that works great.
Laragon.
An LXD container that I can setup with a single bash script
I’ve been using Lando for the last few years. It’s quick and easy for a local dev environment, but it has issues I don’t love. Issues such as, since it spins up a container, sucks for installing plugins. Not that I do much of that locally, but it would be nice. Plugins included via composer aren’t affected, so I have ACF Pro in the mix, which is usually all I need for local dev.
LocalWP here as well, coming from old school MAMP, it was a pretty refreshing change,.
My only big gripe is I just wish they would allow you to remove password from Live link so I can properly test ApplePay. I understand why they don’t but wish we at least had the option.
Mac + using homebrew I just have PHP, Nginx & MySQL installed (and Redis, but rarely used on my local development sites) – very minimal setup & essentially a very similar setup to how my staging/live servers would be set up.
Using Dnsmasq I’ve got “.test” set as the local development TLD, and then I’m utilising an array of bash scripts to automate my set up process for each type of website, in a similar way to how I quickly get actual web servers set up.
The bash scripts (a few different types, geared towards whether I’m setting up a regular WP site, Woo site or something non-WP) go through the entire set up process – everything from generating the Nginx .conf files for that particular domain, to installing WP / setting up the DB & installing the specific bunch of plugins for whichever type of site I’m creating.
From the time I start the script, to when the wp-admin page is opened in the browser by the script, it’s roughly a 20 second wait.
Can you tell I like automating stuff? lol. Various backup scripts that are primarily used on my live sites as well – these export the DB, zip up the website directory & are transferred to a separate server on a daily/weekly/monthly schedule (depending on what sort of website it is).
Docker, with wp-env. Used to use Local, but got tired of how inflexible it is.
Vagrant with virtualbox
LocalWP. Simplify the whole development process.
I used Desktop Server by ServerPress for years until they finally pulled the plug. Now I use Local by Flywheel, which isn’t as good.
The main reason I liked both is you can “file open” pretty much any zipped archive that includes all files and the database. That’s handy for me because I do more maintenance and repair on sites built by other people than I do new site-building. Being able to load an archive quickly lets me do destructive testing, debugging, and assessments.
Local also lets you quickly clone a site, which again is useful when I have to get a site into a particular state and then repeatedly “break” it while debugging otherwise intractable problems.
I do all new builds and site rebuilding on my live development server (SiteGround), which, as others have pointed out, is faster but also a more “real” live-server environment. It also lets clients preview or even log in for training or to add/edit content.
Docker containers
Surprised I’m the first to mention Valet. It’s another Laravel deal. There is also a WP-cli addon that will let you spin up new sites, clone sites and destroy sites. It caches WP core, so setting up a new site takes seconds. It’s good.
The biggest thing I appreciate about it is being able to have it watch a directory and turn every subdirectory into a .test domain on localhost. I can run WordPress, Drupal, custom code… anything that uses a standard web stack.
I’m using WAMP to do all my local stuff… I’m surprised I seem to be alone… Now I’m thinking about looking into other options going forward… Found WAMP… It worked… I’ve kept using it… 🤷🏼♂️
Xampp.
But it is very slow.
But I like it allows me to set virtual hosts and SSL certificates, so I can use the same settings as production. And when I go to deploy, I don’t need to change any of the URLs.
Don’t know how to install memcached on Windows to speed things up, too complicated.
Also, XAMPP keeps fucking up the MySQL users table, need to keep fixing it.
I’m thinking of buying a dedicated server to host an apache server from home, and just connecting to that machine to build websites, and host backups.
Or I need a better laptop. My 2017 i5 8gb is not keeping up. Might need an i7-12gen with 16gb ram.
Xampp
XAMPP. It’s simple and easy.
[Lando]) (which runs on Docker), which runs on Windows 10 (work) or 11 (home) on WSL2.
Gitkraken for git management (Linux version on WSLg since its 100x faster than using the Windows one with WSL folders). GitHub for repos.
I find its a good balance between power/control and simplicity to set up. The initial hurdle of getting everything right was quite difficult, but it means for other devs that want to inherit the system its very straight forward and simple to setup.
Node (within the docker container) to build theme assets, composer to manage WordPress core + plugins and other dependencies. I built something similar to [Roots’ Bedrock]) for project boilerplate, custom starter theme and in-house mu-plugin within it.
Currently PHPloy for deployment locally, looking at using GitHub actions for (limited) testing and automated deployment.
In the past I’ve used XAMPP, Vagrant (with VV & VVV) and Local by Flywheel (version 3.x), Local was great but on all my systems was quite slow. A lot of the features they’ve added in recently haven’t really been targeted at advanced/experienced users and have a lot of extra bloat and bits that only work with WPEngine/Flywheel hosting, which doesn’t do anything useful for us.
I use Laragon. It is very fast and testing worh different PHP versions is easy. I have currently 30+ websites running under it, and I use 5 PHP versions for testing. Switching PHP takes 2 seconds. The downside is the interface that is a bit dated and confusing when using for the first time, but it works great. And, it is Windows only.
I used LocalWP, but it is slow, and prone to breaking. They improved it in recent years, but it is still not very good – I use it for few client websites hosted on Flywheel, and websites are slow, switching PHP is often not working, and Apache to Ngnix switching never works as expected. Sync with Flywheel is the only thing that works great.
Laragon.
An LXD container that I can setup with a single bash script
I’ve been using Lando for the last few years. It’s quick and easy for a local dev environment, but it has issues I don’t love. Issues such as, since it spins up a container, sucks for installing plugins. Not that I do much of that locally, but it would be nice. Plugins included via composer aren’t affected, so I have ACF Pro in the mix, which is usually all I need for local dev.
LocalWP here as well, coming from old school MAMP, it was a pretty refreshing change,.
My only big gripe is I just wish they would allow you to remove password from Live link so I can properly test ApplePay. I understand why they don’t but wish we at least had the option.
Mac + using homebrew I just have PHP, Nginx & MySQL installed (and Redis, but rarely used on my local development sites) – very minimal setup & essentially a very similar setup to how my staging/live servers would be set up.
Using Dnsmasq I’ve got “.test” set as the local development TLD, and then I’m utilising an array of bash scripts to automate my set up process for each type of website, in a similar way to how I quickly get actual web servers set up.
The bash scripts (a few different types, geared towards whether I’m setting up a regular WP site, Woo site or something non-WP) go through the entire set up process – everything from generating the Nginx .conf files for that particular domain, to installing WP / setting up the DB & installing the specific bunch of plugins for whichever type of site I’m creating.
From the time I start the script, to when the wp-admin page is opened in the browser by the script, it’s roughly a 20 second wait.
Can you tell I like automating stuff? lol. Various backup scripts that are primarily used on my live sites as well – these export the DB, zip up the website directory & are transferred to a separate server on a daily/weekly/monthly schedule (depending on what sort of website it is).
Docker, with wp-env. Used to use Local, but got tired of how inflexible it is.
Vagrant with virtualbox
LocalWP. Simplify the whole development process.
I used Desktop Server by ServerPress for years until they finally pulled the plug. Now I use Local by Flywheel, which isn’t as good.
The main reason I liked both is you can “file open” pretty much any zipped archive that includes all files and the database. That’s handy for me because I do more maintenance and repair on sites built by other people than I do new site-building. Being able to load an archive quickly lets me do destructive testing, debugging, and assessments.
Local also lets you quickly clone a site, which again is useful when I have to get a site into a particular state and then repeatedly “break” it while debugging otherwise intractable problems.
I do all new builds and site rebuilding on my live development server (SiteGround), which, as others have pointed out, is faster but also a more “real” live-server environment. It also lets clients preview or even log in for training or to add/edit content.
Docker containers
Surprised I’m the first to mention Valet. It’s another Laravel deal. There is also a WP-cli addon that will let you spin up new sites, clone sites and destroy sites. It caches WP core, so setting up a new site takes seconds. It’s good.
The biggest thing I appreciate about it is being able to have it watch a directory and turn every subdirectory into a .test domain on localhost. I can run WordPress, Drupal, custom code… anything that uses a standard web stack.
I’m using WAMP to do all my local stuff… I’m surprised I seem to be alone… Now I’m thinking about looking into other options going forward… Found WAMP… It worked… I’ve kept using it… 🤷🏼♂️
Xampp.
But it is very slow.
But I like it allows me to set virtual hosts and SSL certificates, so I can use the same settings as production. And when I go to deploy, I don’t need to change any of the URLs.
Don’t know how to install memcached on Windows to speed things up, too complicated.
Also, XAMPP keeps fucking up the MySQL users table, need to keep fixing it.
I’m thinking of buying a dedicated server to host an apache server from home, and just connecting to that machine to build websites, and host backups.
Or I need a better laptop. My 2017 i5 8gb is not keeping up. Might need an i7-12gen with 16gb ram.
Xampp
XAMPP. It’s simple and easy.
[Lando]) (which runs on Docker), which runs on Windows 10 (work) or 11 (home) on WSL2.
Gitkraken for git management (Linux version on WSLg since its 100x faster than using the Windows one with WSL folders). GitHub for repos.
I find its a good balance between power/control and simplicity to set up. The initial hurdle of getting everything right was quite difficult, but it means for other devs that want to inherit the system its very straight forward and simple to setup.
Node (within the docker container) to build theme assets, composer to manage WordPress core + plugins and other dependencies. I built something similar to [Roots’ Bedrock]) for project boilerplate, custom starter theme and in-house mu-plugin within it.
Currently PHPloy for deployment locally, looking at using GitHub actions for (limited) testing and automated deployment.
In the past I’ve used XAMPP, Vagrant (with VV & VVV) and Local by Flywheel (version 3.x), Local was great but on all my systems was quite slow. A lot of the features they’ve added in recently haven’t really been targeted at advanced/experienced users and have a lot of extra bloat and bits that only work with WPEngine/Flywheel hosting, which doesn’t do anything useful for us.