Develop WordPress Sites Locally. 5 Free Tools Compared to Develop Directly on...

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When creating a new site or carrying out maintenance activities on an existing site, it is always a good idea to carry out the activities on your computer locally, without operating directly on the remote web server.The advantages are many: having a local development environment can facilitate and speed up the development process but it can also provide a fundamental testing environment for developers to test new ideas, designs, concepts, themes and plugins.Tools for developing local sites are now essential for quickly creating servers that replicate the functionality of a hosting server on the local machine (on your computer, so to speak).



What does it mean to have a local serverA Special Data local server is a web environment hosted on your computer that allows you to replicate the environment of a web server and respond to HTTP calls from a browser.Basically, once you've set up your local server, you just go to your browser's address bar, type an address, and reach a site that's… On your computer. These websites are technically “offline” and therefore are not accessible to other users publicly across the Internet but only by you (or within your local network, LAN).What it takes to develop a WordPress site locallyTo develop a WordPress site locally it is technically necessary to replicate a LAMP stack , an acronym that indicates the operating system (Linux), the web server (Apache), the database (MySQL) and the programming language with which to develop the particular web application (PHP ).LAMP logo, acronym Lçinux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Pearl, PythonThese components form the specific infrastructure (stack, in fact) with which the server dynamically responds to HTTP requests.






Therefore, to install (and view) a WordPress website on your computer, a LAMP environment must be installed, i.e. a Linux operating system, an Apache server, a database (MySQL or MariaDB) and PHP must be supported and configured.Complicated, right? In reality, the tools we will see shortly make all this very simple and fast.How to choose your ideal solution for developing WordPress sites locallyWhen choosing a solution for the development of a local website, some crucial aspects must be taken into account which can substantially impact the choice.