Local and cloud development

Developers can use the VIP Local Development Environment or GitHub Codespaces options provided by VIP to create a local environment that most closely replicates their WPVIP Platform WordPress environment.

You can choose to use any local or cloud application for development you prefer, but technical support can only be provided for the VIP Local Development Environment or WPVIP’s GitHub Codespaces.

VIP Local Development Environment

The VIP Local Development Environment is built into VIP-CLI and has the same web stack as WordPress environments on the VIP Platform (e.g., WordPress Core, NGINX, PHP).

You can create multiple local environments and configure each one with their own unique settings. Specific versions of software (e.g., WordPress, PHP) can be configured, and features such as Elasticsearch, XDebug, and multisite can all be optionally enabled.

The default configuration for the local environment loads the staging branch of VIP MU plugins, which supplies VIP Platform integrations, enhancements, and helper functions. If you check out an application’s codebase to your local machine, it can be run on the local environment for testing or code development.

The database of your VIP Platform environment can be synced to the local environment with a single VIP-CLI command, and your platform environment’s media can be proxied to eliminate the need to download or copy files.

Read more about user access for the VIP Local Development Environment

GitHub Codespaces by VIP

GitHub CodeSpaces is a cloud-based development environment that enables you to write, test, and debug code directly in the cloud. GitHub Codespaces environments can be created based on WPVIP’s infrastructure using configuration (config) files authored by WPVIP. You can customize the config files for the Codespaces environment to to be nearly identical to your VIP Platform environment.

Read more about developing with GitHub Codespaces for WPVIP

Local development best practices

Node.js is not run on VIP WordPress environments. When developing code locally that requires Node.js—such as plugins or themes for a WordPress application—it is recommended that Node.js on the local development environment is maintained at a Long Term Support (LTS) release version. The resulting artifact from code built locally should then be committed to the application’s GitHub repository as static assets.

WordPress developers are encouraged to install PHP_CodeSniffer (PHPCS) to aid with local development. Scanning code locally with PHPCS provides useful feedback on code quality based on a defined set of coding standards. This feedback is useful for improving the quality of custom code, and can also be useful for evaluating the quality and security of third-party plugins and themes.

Read more about installing and using PHPCS