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The simple answer is, of course, “Not at all.” Professionally speaking, I’m not a developer—I studied online media and now work in sales. I just occasionally build personal websites with friends. Over the past few years, I’ve built quite a few small websites, such as (www.ejw.de)—mostly using a lot of templates and a few small extensions. So I definitely don’t count myself among the “high-profile developers” who understand every line of code in a project and want to know exactly how everything works. Nevertheless, I do expect the sites I develop to work and to be able to work with them as my daily routine allows—since I’m constantly on the go and, as I mentioned, usually don’t work on a project alone. And when I was recently working onwww.ejw.deagain, I realized once more that I need a local development environment: Why? Let me explain:
The whole ordeal began when three project members (a real developer, a real designer, and me) wanted to start developing. XAMPP didn’t work on two of the MacBooks, so we had to switch to MAMP; then we had to overcome various hurdles during the installation of Grunt, since the packages and tools on the computers varied greatly. Finally, ImageMagick wasn’t set up for TYPO3. The end result was that not a single instance worked exactly the same as the others. On one, images weren’t being scaled; the second couldn’t load extensions from the Extension Manager; but the third at least had a stable environment—and it wasn’t the developer’s ;)
How much I would have wished for a virtual machine that anyone could download, which we could all boot up and then immediately start provisioning the project into it using Git and Composer. That way, we’d all have the same software version and could start working on the project right away instead of setting up the development environment.
In the meantime, our IT team has developed such a virtual machine (vBox) for us. The advantage of our new vBox in this case is quite clear: the machines just work, and the dependencies are always the same. That makes a lot of things easier. A tutorial on how to use this box with Neos, for example, is available here.
Since the vBoxes create a local development environment on your own computer that exactly matches the server’s image, we can deploy the code directly from there to the server and keep the software up to date using Git and Composer. This wasn’t possible with the old system. Dependencies in the code arose, for example, because my MacBook is case-insensitive, which means that relative file paths work for me but not on some servers. Some people claim that such dependency issues only occur in large projects, but unfortunately, I can’t confirm that.
When I was at the TYPO3 User Group in Stuttgart recently, I heard someone say that they don’t use a version control system or local instances—they always work on the live site. In my opinion, that really limits your ability to work, because you can’t collaborate with others, and the client has to be okay with the live site being down from time to time.
So the advantage I now have with vBox is the ability to collaborate effectively with multiple team members. Plus, vBox is a “breakable toy”—because if I mess up my local environment, I can simply download vBox again and provision the project anew—done!
As one of approximately 20 million commuters in Germany, I ride the ICE for about an hour every day, from Frankfurt to Karlsruhe. To make good use of this time, I often work on the train. Although there is theoretically internet access on the ICE, the train’s Wi-Fi hotspot is unfortunately rarely sufficient for web development—as we used to do with a development server and SSH or FTP connections. That’s why it’s very convenient for me that our new development environment lets us work offline right on the train. So I grab the latest tips on the project from colleagues as I’m leaving the office, then spend an hour on the ICE working on my web projects undisturbed and focused, and finally do a quick `git pull` and `git push` when I get home. And just like that, the site’s a step further along—and I have a little more free time.
That’s why I love my local development environment.
Here are two options:
1. Read Daniel Lienert’s blog post on using our vBox with Neos. Daniel explains how it works—AND at the same time, you can get to know or try out the Neos CMS.
2. Alternatively, you can pre-order a local development environment with our proServer (shipping starting May 31, 2016).
