![]() ![]() Once it’s set up, creating a local dev site is fairly straightforward, and utilizes a similar wizard for the process. During installation, Desktop Server runs a wizard with simple instructions and some basic options for getting your virtual server up and running. The company brand and the software they maintain is reminiscent of Microsoft, but rest assured, they do offer support for both the latest Mac OS and Windows platforms. The team at ServerPress launched Desktop Server about a decade ago so their product definitely has some longevity to it. We’ll explore the methods of deployment available, hosting options for production, and the unique features provided with both platforms. There are good reasons to consider them both, so let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons. Both of these pieces of software must be downloaded and installed on your machine and they each have a free and Pro version available. Now, let’s consider the two local dev tools mentioned already, Local and Desktop Server, which are specific to WordPress. However, the premium version of Desktop Server has a DS-CLI tool, giving you command line access to your projects, and WP-CLI is fully integrated. With Local, in particular, you have to use their application to open the SSH container separately for each site, instead of directly executing commands in the working directory. Now, if you’re using WP-CLI in your daily workflow, you may not necessarily be a huge fan of these GUI oriented solutions for local development. Fortunately, there are some great tools out there to help get a local development set up running in no time! It’s wise to make this practice a part of your approach, and iis an essential part of forming a productive and safe workflow as a developer. This helps reduce the risk of breaking the live site, while giving the developer a sandbox environment to test changes. Most consider it best practice to have a local copy of any production website available for testing and making changes. However, they each provide a unique feature set that is often geared toward UX, in regard to both the skill level and common workflow patterns of their users. There are classic local server tools like XAMMP and MAMP and some tools are more command-line-oriented, while others are web-based. Some are more of an integrated development environment (IDE) for testing and building websites or other software projects, others are more specific to the task of creating a website locally. I love it for testing my themes and plugins on multiple sites with different content, PHP, and WordPress versions.In the world of web development, there are various tools that one can use for setting up a local virtual server. You will need to do this on each site you want to run your theme or plugin on. Now you can work on the files from your Theme directory and see the changes reflected on your Local site. And if you’re working with plugins switch to /app/public/wp-content/plugins/plugin-name. ![]() Set this to /app/public/wp-content/themes/theme-name. This is where we tell Local where the theme files should be mapped to. The next field you’ll need to set is Add Container Destination. Just click Browse and select your theme directory. This is going to be the path to your theme files on your system. You’ll see two fields that need to be set. Once you’ve added and restarted Local you’ll have a Volumes option under your More tab. Check the checkbox by the Volumes addon to enable it Go to Settings » Add-ons inside Local (1.1.0 or newer) and click on Install Add-onĤ. The solution is a useful little add-on Flywheel has built that allows mounting of additional directories into your sites. The problem we run into is that Local uses Virtualbox which doesn’t support symlinking outside of the shared Virtualbox folder. Helps me keep things up to date as I test different setups. So I can do this to have multiple WordPress sites use the same theme files. This lets me reference the theme files from my main Themes directory in the wp-content/themes directory. In the case of themes I store the git repo of the theme files in my Themes directory and symlink it to my Sites/site/app/public/wp-content/themes directory of the current site I’m working on locally. And it’ll show in your file system, but WordPress won’t recognize the theme or plugin. One issue I ran into is that a traditional symlink won’t work with the container based setup Local uses. It’s got some really nice features and has a nicer GUI than Vagrant and it’s free-er than MAMP. I’ve been testing out Local by Flywheel for local development recently. In my theme or plugin development workflow I like to keep the git repository separate from my local WordPress install. I’ve written on a development workflow with symlinks before and Kinsta has a great article on symlinks. As of the release of Local Lightning (5.0+) the Volumes addon used in this article is no longer in use.
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