One such configuration is Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV), a configuration designed specifically for WordPress development. One of Vagrant’s best features is the ability to have configurations that you can apply for different use cases. Vagrant is a virtual machine (VM)–centric solution for running local development environments. While there are some slight variations in terms of what each server offers, particularly with XAMPP, all these local servers are suitable for WordPress development and are similar in usage, with beginner-friendly, turnkey solutions, as they each only need to be installed and are otherwise ready for development out of the box. XAMPP is similar, with its acronym representing multiplatform, Apache, MariaDB, PHP, and Perl. You will note that these pieces of software map directly to the core components required to run WordPress-the web server, the database, and the PHP runtime. The remaining letters denote Apache, MySQL, and PHP, respectively. For WAMP and MAMP, the first letter (W/M) represents either Windows or macOS as the platforms these bundles are intended to run on (though confusingly, MAMP also runs on Windows). The names of these packages are acronyms that represent the characteristics of each bundle. XAMPP / WAMP / MAMPĪlthough these are technically three separate software bundles, XAMPP, WAMP, and MAMP are grouped here for brevity, as they are conceptually very similar. There are several popular methods for running local development environments for WordPress, some of which are covered by the official developer handbook. For production workloads, you should typically consider one of the many WordPress hosting services available. Mostly, these tools are suitable for development, local testing, validation, and trialing or experimenting with plugins and themes. This priority shift is fine as long as you keep this limitation in mind and don’t try to use a local development environment tool for your user-facing production site. Some of the solutions for local development environments tend to prioritize convenience and ease of use over security and production-readiness to circumvent these issues. Imposing this same level of restriction in a development environment would be unnecessary and actively disruptive to your development efforts if you wanted to simply check some records in the database. In a production environment, you would likely want to lock down database access so that only connections from particular hosts are permitted. Precisely mirroring this setup for local development would be unnecessarily cumbersome, and the limitations imposed for security would likely be detrimental to the developer experience.Ĭonsider, for example, database access. These can be hosted in any number of ways but will usually be locked down with restricted access for security purposes. Several components are at play in a normal user-facing WordPress site, such as the web server (often Apache or Nginx), the PHP-FPM runtime, and the database. Running WordPress Locallyīefore diving in and setting up a local development environment for WordPress, please note that there are multiple ways to do so, each with varying benefits and limitations. Then you’ll make some changes to see it all in action. In this article, you’ll learn about the different types of local development environments commonly used with WordPress and how to set up your own development environment with Docker. In the case of WordPress, local development environments are often used to assist in building new sites, testing changes to existing sites, and developing or trialing new plugins and themes. This gives you a safe environment to make changes, break and fix things, and watch your changes take place in real time, all without disrupting your users. They allow you to run your code, applications, and sites on your workstation, similarly to how they run on a production server. As a software developer, you’re likely familiar with local development environments.
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