WPBelfast May Meetup - Installing & Running WordPress Locally

As always everyone is welcome, we have beginners and we have developers in our group, so please do come along regardless or your WordPress knowledge!

Meetup at 6:30 pm - with 15mins for general chat, then we will get straight into the topics.

Note: Although this sounds like a very technical Meetup, it will be presented in a way that will be suited anyone who runs a WordPress site, and not just for developers.

Installing and running WordPress locally can give you a huge amount of freedom.
Freedom of the fear of breaking your live site, and freedom to test plugins and themes, and the freedom to develop plugins.

For this meetup, we will look at three (or more) systems available to allow you to install, run and test WordPress locally on your own system.

First, Brendan will give a brief demo of Docker: https://www.docker.com
Then Mark will demo and test VVV (Varying Vagrant Vagrants) - https://varyingvagrantvagrants.org
Lastly Heather will give us a run-down of the 'new kid on the block', DDEV (see below).

Heather McNamee
Open Strategy Partners, works on technical communications for open source companies and communities. She’s developed hundreds of hours of learning and certification materials to help users get the most out of the products they love. As a contributor, she writes documentation, tutorials, has helped run and promote events.

Heather will show a demo of how to spin up a Docker-based local development environment in WordPress using DDEV. She’ll show you how to run multiple projects at once, switch between them, destroy the containers - all while keeping your data intact so you can start up fast each time you want to start working. If you’re using MAMP, Vagrant, or other tools you’ll find DDEV is faster, easier to maintain, and use every day.

DDEV’s great for teams because you don’t have to spend time debugging different local dev environments. It makes it easier to onboard new developers, and easier to handoff projects. She’ll show you how other communities are using this tool also to help onboard new contributors at contribution sprints. (Instead of spending the first few hours running install fests!)

Heather would like to hear what alternatives you’re using and how that compares to what you’ve seen in DDEV. Let’s talk about local dev environments for WordPress!

She wrote recently about baking best practices into your local dev environment with DDEV
https://www.drud.com/ddev-local/web-development-best-practices-every-time/

If you’re curious here’s how to Get Started with DDEV
https://www.drud.com/get-started/