

Most of all though, you shouldn’t have to be a sysadmin in order to be able to spin up, maintain, and tear down development environments on your local machine, so we need something that’s easy to use and will do most of the heavy lifting for us. Being able to switch those on the fly or at least select different configs for different dev sites is extremely helpful. If you’re developing something like a WordPress theme or plugin, it’s also often necessary to make sure that your code runs well on different servers, under different versions of PHP and MySQL. For example: most devs work on more than one project, so it’s extremely helpful to be able to quickly spin up new environments with dedicated urls.
XAMPP VS MAMP FOR MAC INSTALL
While many computers are capable of hosting a WordPress site without needing to install any extra packages, there are a few advantages that a dedicated local development environment can offer. Developing in a local environment lets you make changes to dev sites quickly and easily without having to transfer files anywhere and greatly reduces the risk of making breaking changes on a live server.

An easy-to-use local testing server is one of the most important tools in a WordPress developer’s utility belt 1.
