The simple answer is of course: "Not at all". According to my profession, I'm not a developer because I studied online media and now work in sales. I only occasionally develop private websites together with friends. In the last few years, I have created a few smaller websites such as(www.ejw.de)- mostly with a lot of templating and a few small extensions. So I'm definitely not one of those "high profile developers" who understand every line of code in the project and want to know exactly how everything works. Nevertheless, I want the sites I develop to work and I want to be able to work with them as much as my everyday life allows - because I'm always on the go and, as I mentioned before, I don't usually work alone on a project. And when I was working on www.ejw.de again the other day, I realized once again that I need a local development environment: Why? I would now like to explain:
A local development environment means less pain when setting up a new web project
The whole drama started when three project participants (a real developer, a real designer and me) wanted to start developing. On two MacBooks the XAMPP didn't work and we had to switch to the MAMP, then we had to overcome different hurdles when installing grunt as the packages and tools were very different on the machines. Finally, ImageMagick was not set up for TYPO3. The end of the story was that not a single instance worked exactly like the others. On one, images were not scaled, the second could not load extensions from the Extension Manager, but the third at least had a stable environment - it wasn't the developer ;)
How much I would have liked a virtual box that everyone could download, which we could all boot up and then start provisioning the project directly into it using git and composer. That way we'd all have the same software version and could start working on the project straight away instead of setting up the development environment.
In the meantime, I have had a virtual box (vBox) developed by our technical department. The advantage of our new vBox in this case is clearly that the machines can simply work like this and the dependencies are always the same. This makes many things easier. A tutorial on how to use this box with Neos, for example, can be found here.
Since the vBoxes create a local development environment on your own computer that corresponds exactly to the image of the server, we have the option of delivering the code directly from there to the server and keeping the software up to date via Git and Composer. This was not possible with the old system. Dependencies in the code arose, for example, because my MacBook is case-insensitive, which means that relative file links work for me and not on some servers. Some people claim that such dependency problems only occur in large projects, but unfortunately I cannot confirm this.
I can also work offline with a local development environment
When I was recently at the TYPO3 User Group in Stuttgart, I heard from someone that he doesn't use a versioning system or local instances, but always works on the live system. I think this is quite restrictive when working, because you can't collaborate with people and it must be okay for the customer if the live site is sometimes broken.
The advantage I now have with the vBox is the ability to work together with several team members in a meaningful way. The vBox is also a "breakable toy", because if I break the local environment, I can simply download the vBox again and reprovision the project - done!
As one of about 20 million commuters in Germany, I take the ICE train from Frankfurt to Karlsruhe for about an hour every day. To make good use of this time, I often work on the train. Theoretically, there is also Internet on the ICE, but unfortunately, the hotspot on the ICE is rarely sufficient for website development like I used to do with a development server and SSH or FTP connection. That's why it's very convenient for me that the new development environment allows us to work offline directly on the train. This means I can get the last tips on project development from colleagues as I leave the company, then spend an hour on the ICE working on my web projects undisturbed and concentrated, and finally a quick git pull & git push at home. And then the site has made some progress - and I have a little more free time ![]()
That's why I love my local development environment.
You think the idea is cool and want to try out the vBox?
You have two options here:
1. Read Daniel Lienert's blog post on using our vBox with Neos. Daniel explains how it works - AND you can get to know and try out the Neos CMS at the same time.
2. Alternatively, you can pre-order a local development environment with our proServer (delivery from May 31, 2016).
