Windows (or Mac... I guess :) Local Dev Setup that you use

Development
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I’ve seen reference in the old Wiki to using something like Scotchbox.io, Vagrant, and other solutions. I’m curious if anyone has a recent post or reference to local environment setups that are “simple”. I’ve setup Linux servers with Nginx or Apache and used those, I’ve used services like CodeAnywhere.

What a simple solution looks like to me, for development and testing only.

  1. Minimal configuration, management, updating security, etc.
  2. Low/Zero recurring cost (Mostly hobby development)
  3. Repeatable (Spin up an environment in a minute or less and test something out, delete it whenever)

I’ve preferred containerized solutions in the past. I like the idea that I’m not installing and configuring supporting software on my machine… but maybe that’s not realistic and it’s not that big a deal to install MySQL/MariaDB locally, configure, etc.

Or does somebody have a VirtualBox image with an Ubuntu LEMP stack pre-installed with Modx 2.8.1 that they want to share? Maybe that’s a simple way. Publish out to the community some MODX pre-installed images for development?

Thanks!
Jared

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I’m a macOS user. I use Valet+ for my local development setup:

Valet+ is a development environment for macOS. No Vagrant, no Docker, no /etc/hosts file.

To make it work with friendly URLs etc you need a custom driver: MODX Revolution Valet Driver

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I’ve used MAMP Pro for Mac many years now. They also have a Windows version. It’s not containerized so a bit more restrictive than an actual virtual machine you can install different things on, but it just runs all the time and allows me to add hosts, change PHP versions, etc, just in a few clicks.

There’s also a repo here with a sample docker setup: https://github.com/modxcms/docker-modx

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Thanks for the suggestions and brief insight into some local development options. I’ve come across the Bitnami MODX stack previously and played around with it this week. I think this might fit the bill for me. They also have a stack install which appears to work more like MAMP or WAMP. From a screenshot it might even be using some of those components and just wrapping them from WAMP.

They basically have a pre-configured VM that you can run on VMWare Player or VirtualBox. There are a few steps, but some benefits I can see for sure. I’m using it on VirtualBox which I think has the below benefits.

  1. Open Source
  2. Snapshot capability (Another way to save a state outside of just source control. Test out a script or idea and then simply roll back to a previous snapshot)

So far here’s what I’ve played with:

  1. Laragon Mentioned by @bruno17. Works fairly well and says that it is isolated and doesn’t touch the OS: “like a Virtual Machine, it doesn’t touch your OS”.
  2. The Bitnami VM mentioned above. It’s a little bit of a learning curve since the directory structure and configuration has some differences, but there is documentation that covers it.

Anyway, I like the VM so far. I’m planning on playing with it some more and I’ll write up a post if anyone else is interested. I’ll also play with Laragon some more for a comparison point. That seems to be the closest to something like MAMP on the Mac.