A short presentation given at the November Melbourne WordPress developers meet up. It covers an brief introduction to using Vagrant to set-up a local development environment for WordPress projects.

1. Working with Vagrant in my
WordPress development
workflow
James Bundey @jamesbundey
Melbourne WordPress Developer Meetup November ‘14

2. What is Vagrant?
Create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and
portable development environments
https://www.vagrantup.com

3. Why bother?
• Simple to set-up
• Enables you to easily recreate local development
configurations
• Enables easy and total management of each
environments
• Keeps development clean - run one set-up for
WordPress projects another for another CMS
• Take advantage of the open source configurations
created by people far smarter than me.

4. Getting started
1. Install Virtual Box - We need this to create the virtual machines
that are going to house our development environments -
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
2. Install Vagrant - https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html
3. Install two extremely useful plugins via the command line
• Vagrant Hostsupdater - enables you to access your
development server via a web browser without additional
configuration
$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater
• Vagrant Triggers - backs up and restores the database after
every shutdown and boot up.
$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-triggers

5. Vagrant & WordPress configuration
• Once Vagrant is set-up we need to create a configuration file to set-up
the development environment
• Thankfully there’s lots already out there - here’s a great overview of some
http://wptavern.com/13-vagrant-resources-for-wordpress-development
• I’m using Varying Vagrant Vagrants - https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-
Vagrants/VVV
• To set-up our WordPress environment, we simply git clone VVV to a
folder and run
cd ~/new-folder
vagrant up
• Sit back and grab a cup of tea (I am british after all) while it works its
magic

6. Vagrant & WordPress
• Once completed you’ll have four WordPress site
configurations installed in the www folder
• WordPress Stable: local.wordpress.dev (typically what I’m going to use)
• WordPress Trunk:local.wordpress-trunk.dev
• WordPress Develop: src.wordpress-develop.dev & build.wordpress-develop.dev
• You can now access & freely develop as required -
http://local.wordpress.dev
• To access phpMyAdmin - http://vvv.dev/database-admin/

7. Some useful extensions
• VVV Site Wizard - saves time by enabling you to easily
create additional WordPress installs. The wizard guides
you through the set-up & creates the database, host
names etc - https://github.com/aliso/vvv-site-wizard
• VVV Dashboard - creates a dashboard that can be
viewed in the browser, that enables you to easily view
and manage all your installs
• Vagant Manager - OSX app for managing Vagrant
installs - http://www.vagrantmanager.com

8. Integrating with my workflow
1. Using the VVV wizard I create a new install on the same
server - standard install
2. I store the plugins that I use 99.9% of the time in all
projects in a Git repository, which I clone to the wp-content
folder
3. I clone my framework, to the themes folder as my base
4. I then remove the .git file as I will be creating a new repo
to host this theme
5. I install my Bower & Grunt dependencies and start
developing

9. Any problems
• So far none. I’ve found it extremely useful to set-up and
much quicker than Mamp Pro
• Highly recommend the app, as it makes things easy
• Keeping each environment separate has been a bonus
and for those using other CMS there are very similar
configuration files.
• Experimented with sharing the environment across
multiple machines using Dropbox and sym links, with
mixed success.

10. Questions?
Connect with me
@jamesbundey
www.linkedin.com/in/jamesbundey