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Running a Development Copy of WordPress

Having a development instance of WordPress is a good way to update, develop, and modify a website without interrupting the live version of WordPress. There are many ways to set up a development copy of WordPress, but this article will cover the basics, best practices, tips, and some tools to make running a development copy of WordPress much easier.

Installing WordPress on your computer

Use these instructions to set up a local server environment for testing and development.

Installing WordPress locally is usually meant for development. Those interested in development should follow the instructions below and download WordPress locally.

  • Studio by WordPress.com - A free, AI_powered, open-source software to manage multiple WordPress sites locally.
  • Local – Free, one-click WordPress installer.
  • DDEV - Free, open-source, high-performance development environment for Windows, WSL2, Mac, and Linux. Abstracts away all of the difficulty of running a Docker environment. Can seamlessly share local sites over public domains. One command to launch a database editor. Xdebug and other performance profiling tools "just work."
  • Lando – Free plugin to install WordPress locally.
  • AMPPS – A free WAMP/MAMP/LAMP stack with Softaculous Installer built in. It can 1-click install and upgrade WordPress and others as well.
  • Installing WordPress Locally on Your Mac With MAMP
  • User:Beltranrubo/BitNami Free all-in-one installers for OS X, Windows and Linux. There are also available installers for WordPress Multisite User:Beltranrubo/BitNami_Multisite using different domains or subdomains.
  • Instant WordPress is a free, standalone, portable WordPress development environment for Windows that will run from a USB key.

Software Appliance - Ready-to-use

You may find that using a pre-integrated software appliance is a great way to get up and running with WordPress, especially in combination with virtual machine software (e.g., VMWare, VirtualBox, Xen HVM, KVM).

Parallels is another software that can be used. Unlike virtual machine software, it requires payment. It allows you to run both Mac and Windows on your machine.

A software appliance allows users to skip the manual installation of WordPress and its dependencies and instead deploy a self-contained system that requires little to no setup in just a couple of minutes.

  • TurnKey WordPress Appliance: a free Debian-based appliance that just works. It bundles a collection of popular WordPress plugins and features a small footprint, automatic security updates, SSL support, and a Web administration interface. Available as ISO, virtual machine images, or launch in the cloud.

Unattended/automated installation of WordPress on Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS

Two WordPress Installations with One Database

Note: This method is NOT recommended if you plan on doing database development.

A popular approach to running a local copy of your live site is using the same local and live database. Using the same database will allow you to work on your local copy and push changes from local to your production with no break in uptime.

Setup of the local copy

Once you have your local files set up, you must modify wp-config.php in the root of your local install.

define('WP_HOME',  "https://{$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']}");
define('WP_SITEURL', "https://{$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']}");

ob_start( 'ob_replace_home_url' );
function ob_replace_home_url( $content ) {
    $home_urls = array(
        'https://site.testing.example.com',
        'https://site.example.com',
        'https://site.authoring.testing.example.com',
        'https://site.authoring.example.com',
    );

    $content = str_replace( $home_urls, WP_HOME, $content );

    return $content;
}

Using a Drop-In

What if we don’t want to hack core code? Avoiding changes to core code is a good practice for easy upgrading and code-sharing. There is even a filter for this (pre_option_siteurl and pre_option_home) but there’s a problem: within wp-settings.php,

  • the filter can’t be defined until after line 65 when functions.php is included
  • WordPress makes calls to get_option on line 155 of (via wp_plugin_directory_constants())
  • plugins aren’t defined until later down around line 194.

However, between lines 65 and 155, there is something we can use, namely the loading of the drop-in db.php; the filter can be safely defined there. (However, this is perhaps only halfway towards “not core” code.) Check if you already have an existing wp-content/db.php before trying this technique. Plugins like W3 Total Cache use it for similar reasons.

<?php
// paste this in a (new) file, wp-content/db.php
add_filter ( 'pre_option_home', 'test_localhosts' );
add_filter ( 'pre_option_siteurl', 'test_localhosts' );
function test_localhosts( ) {
  if (... same logic as before to see if on dev site ...) {
     return "https://my.example.com/dev";
  }
  else return false; // act as normal; will pull main site info from db
}

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