{"id":1033,"date":"2015-10-17T05:58:21","date_gmt":"2015-10-17T11:58:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fallows.ca\/wp\/uncategorized\/wordpress-local-development\/"},"modified":"2016-12-13T19:45:29","modified_gmt":"2016-12-13T19:45:29","slug":"wordpress-local-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fallows.ca\/wp\/projects\/software-projects\/wordpress-local-development\/","title":{"rendered":"WordPress Local Development"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"WordPress<\/a><\/p>\n

If you are interested, here is a short \u201chow to\u201d for setting up a WordPress local development system\u00a0at home. Some tech talk lies ahead, but it is easily accomplished by anyone serious about doing some WordPress programming.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In my last article, I described the basics of programming WordPress using a few tools like the NetBeans IDE (integrated development environment) and simple PHP programming. A basic WordPress local development system\u00a0consists of an IDE like NetBeans and a local web server. This article is about setting up a web server on your PC and using it for programming WordPress. Everything described here is open source (free), runs on Windows (as well as Linux and Apple) and widely supported.<\/p>\n

There are various packages for setting up a WordPress local development server on your PC. The easiest one I have used is a local install from Bitnami<\/a>. Just download and install. You will have your local web server up and running in five minutes.\u00a0 When you run the installation, you enter a user name and password for your WordPress server, as well as a name for your local web site. By local, I mean a web site that runs on your computer and home network, but is not visible to the outside world.<\/p>\n

I give my WordPress local development server a pretend web site address, such as \u201ctest.com\u201d. You can call yours anything you want, it doesn\u2019t really matter. In order to access this \u201cpretend web site\u201d, you need to put the information about it into the Windows \u201chosts\u201d file. This file is located in the C:WindowsSystem32driversetc sub-directory. You can edit this file with Notepad as long as you Run As Administrator. You just need to enter the local IP address of your PC as well as the fake web site name. So, for example, my server PC is located at 192.168.0.5 on my home network. The single line I added to the \u201chosts\u201d file is:<\/p>\n

192.168.0.5 \u00a0test.com<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s it. You can now access your private WordPress web site from any computer on your LAN using the pretend web address \u201cHTTP:\/\/test.com\u201d in your browser, as long as you modify the hosts file on each computer as described above.<\/p>\n

By default, Bitnami installs into a folder on your PC called C:Bitnami. You can access the web site using your browser, and you can also access all of the server files using your normal Windows Explorer.<\/p>\n

WordPress Local Development \u2013 Connecting NetBeans and XDebug<\/h2>\n

In order to write code and upload it to your server, you just configure Netbeans so that it knows\u00a0three things:<\/p>\n