Your local web development environment is critical to your ability to efficiently produce high quality and well-tested software projects. This environment should be incredibly easy to use. It should support the way you work, making you better and faster while demanding very little of your time. In this hands-on lab, you will setup your local web development environment. It will include version control with Git, helper apps, package managers (Composer, Node, and npm), task runner with Gulp, local webserver, and a professional editor.
Re-recorded: March 27, 2018 – This entire lab has been updated and recorded for all the new upgrades.
If you are on a Mac, don’t worry. We have you covered too. See the version of this lab that is just for you: Local Development Environment Setup for Mac.
There are many product choices and a lot of buzz on the market about what constitutes a professional workflow and environment. These environments save you time and frustration while giving you the means to improve the quality of the software you write, which helps you become more confident in your work.
Let’s remember that the goal of the local development environment:
The local development environment’s job is to make you more efficient, reducing your time to produce high quality and well-tested software projects. It should spin up easily with minimal effort from you, do its job, and support your workflow. Bottomline: it must make you more efficient and effective. Period.
What are the Components?
A local development environment consists of the following components:
- Version control
- A local webserver
- Package managers
- Task runner
- Testing and debug environment
- Professional IDE
- Sniffers to sniff out and alert you to potential problems and/or coding standard issues
Who needs copy/paste? Right. Writing code from scratch is fun!
Episodes
Total Lab Runtime: 02:32:39
- 1 The Keys to Your Local Development Environmentfree 22:03
- 2 Install and Configure Gitfree 19:46
- 3 Setting up SSH for GitHubfree 15:00
- 4 VirtualBox and Vagrantfree 13:00
- 5 LocalHost - Local by Flywheel (preferred)free 16:50
- 6 LocalHost - VVV (optional)free 14:42
- 7 What is a Package Manager?free 00:00
- 8 Composer - PHP Dependency Managerfree 14:16
- 9 Node.js and npm – JavaScript Package Managerfree 06:03
- 9 Gulp – Task Runnerfree 07:29
- 10 Atom - Text Editorfree 07:25
- 11 PhpStorm - Installationfree 11:43
- 12 Wrap it Upfree 04:22
Tune Your Local Development Environment
Want to continue tuning your local development environment? Follow this path to get the most out of your workflow.