Tips on Local Development

Okay, so I've posted before about MAMP, XAMPP and the alter­na­tives but now I'm going to dig a bit deeper into tricks and tips. Bear in mind that I'm writ­ing this on how I do my devel­op­ment and your soft­ware choices and the like may be some­what dif­fer­ent than mine.

Local­host: XAMPP
Lan­guage: PHP
Data­base: Sequel Pro
Edi­tor: Coda
OS: Snow Leop­ard

I usu­ally set up my sites in the Default ~/Sites folder on my Mac, just to keep things in one area mainly and for this demo we'll be using stardup.com (a domain I own and have never really done any­thing with due to time restraints).

I found this tuto­r­ial online a while back by Arron Wolf and it was a really good way to keep my log­i­cal file struc­ture instead of dup­ing direc­to­ries back and forth from XAMPP's native htdocs folder. This is not super intense a process even though some peo­ple may shy away from Com­mand Line. Fol­low along with the instruc­tions on that site if you want to get it set up for your lat­est project. Go ahead, I'll wait…

…Okay great, you're back! Now let's begin with one really dead easy trick to keep your con­fig­u­ra­tion files work­ing on both sides, with­out hav­ing to change them every time you com­mit many site changes.

This can be done in any other pro­gram­ming lan­guage, how­ever the if/else syn­tax changes a bit. I've also begun tak­ing this a lit­tle fur­ther, includ­ing other bits in my code like $header and $footer stuff that will help me visu­ally deter­mine which one I may be look­ing at (as I'm often too lazy to look at the address bar).

So my next tip is related to run­ning a light­weight ver­sion of XAMPP (because you really don't need all of the fea­tures for local devel­op­ment). I write a very sim­ple Apple­script that launches XAMPP with options, and then placed it in my Sys­tem Pref­er­ences > Accounts > My Account > Login Items

Now I know a lot of the more hard­core pro­gram­mers are prob­a­bly won­der­ing why I have to do the username/pass with admin­is­tra­tor priv­i­leges twice, the answer is because I know only as much Apple­script as I need to, and noth­ing more.