Adios Vagrant, hello again MAMP (Pro)

I’ve been using VVV (Varying Vagrant Vagrants) for a bit over a year now with a few helper scripts for WordPress development primarily, but alas it’s time to end our relationship. The upkeep time isn’t worth it. It’s caused my computer to crash on a few occasions now. I’m not saying it’s bad by any means (it’s pretty dang awesome when it’s working), but it’s a bit more than I need with more moving pieces than I’d like.

Here’s a bit on my process moving from VVV to other stuff.

SVN (terminal junk)

I decided to try SVN via terminal this time. Mostly, I find every GUI pretty horrible for SVN and Git so I figured it was worth a shot. Here’s the scary SVN command to clone WordPress trunk:

$ svn co https://develop.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/ wp-dev

Yep. That’s pretty much it. All it does is clone the files in the develop.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/ into a new folder called wp-dev. Neato. The biggest benefit for me is that now I can navigate to the folder in terminal and run svn up to update to the latest stuffs on trunk.

You can do the same thing with individual releases as well via tags like this:

$ svn co https://develop.svn.wordpress.org/tags/4.2.2/ wp-stock

Or you can just download the latest at wordpress.org/download/.

Once you have a WordPress install downloaded, get some MAMP.

Big MAMPin

For those of you just getting started, MAMP is a bit of software that starts up an Apache and MySQL server. This is handy when setting up local WordPress installs.

I finally got me some MAMP Pro. It’s not really necessary, but it’s pretty dang nice. Here’s the sweet sweet GUI.

There’s only a little setup needed to get custom TLDs and folders going and there’s one step I’d recommend changing before jumping in.

MAMP Pro defaults to some p cray ports, so hop on over to the General settings tab and click the Set ports to 80, 443, and 3306 button. It looks like this:

It just keeps your URLs nice and tidy. Instead of develop.wp:8888, you get develop.wp. Rad.

Now that the ports are set, start adding hosts and folders. Then we get to do the super fun task of setting up MySQL databases. Lucky for us, MAMP has a nice big ol’ button to launch Sequel Pro if you have it installed. (Install it.)

Sequel Pro(fesh)

This is definitely my favorite way to interact with MySQL databases. Fortunately, for my purposes, I don’t have to use it often. When setting up my bunches of WP installs, I just created a database for each install in a few clicks. Here’s the whole setup:

For those new to it, the default user and passwords are root. Keep in mind, this is terrible practice for anything other than local use.

wp-config.php

Now for the suuuuper hard part. You’re going to want to copy wp-config-sample.php into the src folder and rename it to wp-config.php.

Then, assuming you haven’t customized too much of the above bits, the parts you need to fill in should look pretty much like this:

You will need to change the DB_NAME to the name of the database created via Sequel Pro. If you changed the username and password, you may need to change those as well. Otherwise, root for both will work.

Perfection

Well, not really. It’s a little more legwork to set this up than using a VVV script, but I like knowing all the moving pieces in play.

What’s your WP local setup?