Has this ever happened to you?
Your client wants to check the progress and you are forced to tell your client that the site is not live on server and you are working on your local environment. So it’s hard to share a link with him.
Here’s a tool that can help you in such situations.
Local By Flywheel
- know as local, is built for speed and simplicity. Build WordPress sites faster than ever before.
Local is a local environment optimised for wordpress. It’s an alternative to tools like WAMP, MAMP, LAMP and XAMP.
Local works in background for developing sites quickly. A new wordpress site can be installed in few clicks without downloading wordpress, no editing in wp-config.php or fiddling with ports.
Local has many attractive options that make a web developers life easier, especially when working with clients. Their Live Link feature makes it easy to work locally and share your work progress with your clients.
Delightful & Powerful Features
Here are a few reasons why Local is the best solution for local WordPress web development!
- SPEED AND SIMPLICITY
- ONE-CLICK WORDPRESS INSTALLATION
- SIMPLE DEMO URLS
- HASSLE-FREE LOCAL SSL SUPPORT
- SSH + WP-CLI ACCESS
- FLEXIBLE ENVIRONMENT OPTIONS
Refer below link for more details about features :
https://local.getflywheel.com/features
Installing Local by Flywheel
Local by flywheel is available on both Windows and Mac, free to download.
Installation of Local is easy: simply visit https://local.getflywheel.com/ and click on the “Free Download” button. It’ll ask for a few pieces of information, and whether or not you want to use the Mac OSX version (stable) or a beta version of their Windows client.
Go through the initial setup. It should only take a few minutes. Click on Let’s Go button.
After done with installation, it’s time to create new site.
Creating a New Site
Site can be created in 3 steps:
1. Setup site
2. Setup environment
3. Setup wordpress
1. Setup Site
The first step is to name your site. Whatever you choose will be copied across your domain and path (see the Advanced Options).
You can configure your site name and site path in advanced options.
By default your site domain will end with .local, but you can change this to another suffix if you prefer e.g. my-first-site.dev.
You can modify both the name and the local URL later, but not the site path. So if you want to choose a custom path, do it now.
Blueprints
If you build sites with the similar basic setup again, save time by saving your site as a Blueprint. You can then easily re-use this configuration when you add a new site.
2. Setup Environment
Next, you have a choice of server environments. If you host with Flywheel, you’ll want to use their Preferred option, which mirrors their own web hosting.
You can also select your own Custom setup, with the choices of:
1. PHP version: 5.2.4 to 7.2.0
2. Web server: nginx or Apache
3. MySQL version: 5.5 or 5.6
3. Setup Wordpress
Add your prefered wordpress username/password and email.
If you want a multisite, be sure to click on the Advanced Options to get the choice, as this can’t be changed later. Local supports both subdomain and subdirectory multisites.
Site Setup
From this first view you can :
- View a site
- Login to your site admin
- Set development mode on/off
- Stop/start the site
Open the folder on your local machine with the site’s files – click on the arrow next to the path under your site’s name.
Database
Local by Flywheel uses Adminer by default for database access.
SSL
SSL support is there but you need to enable it: go to the SSL tab and Trust the certificate.
You can than go to e.g: https://my-first-site.local
Cloning a Site
Any Local site can be cloned to create a new Local site. The process is very similar to making a Blueprint, except that the configuration isn’t stored for reuse.
Exporting a Site
Exporting creates a zip file of your entire site configuration. You can use this if you want to move a site into a Local installation on another computer.
Switch your server environment
Imagine you are developing a plugin and want to check that it runs with different versions of PHP. No problem! It’s super simple to change PHP version with Local.
From Site Setup, select a Custom setup for your Local Environment. Then you can simply upgrade or downgrade PHP on the site you are working on. Or indeed, change web server.
When you do this, there are a couple of warnings:
1. If you used SSH access (see later) you’ll lose any changes you made, unless you Clone the site.
2. You may have to wait for new dependencies to be downloaded.
Copying a live site to Local by Flywheel
If you don’t have hosting with staging as a feature, working on a local copy of a live site is a very good way to test out changes without risking mishaps.
If you’re lucky enough to be using Flywheel’s hosting service, copying a site is easy. You can login and connect it to Flywheel, then pull live sites into Local.
Copying multisite installs is not supported at this time. Copying your live site is relatively simple. All you need is:
1. A backup of your site’s wp-content folder.
2. A .sql file with the site’s database.
Move the SQL file inside the wp-content folder, then zip the folder. Then drag and drop this zip file into the Local by Flywheel window. The app does all the hard work for you in recreating the site, including rewriting all the URLs.
Creating a live link for your site
When your site is not ready for production or you want to show it to your client for review, instead of moving it to a testing or development server you can create ‘Live Link’ and can share it with anyone. Enabling this will give a live URL to use from any device.
Viewing Emails
One disadvantage of developing locally is that transactional emails aren’t sent by WordPress.
Fortunately, under the Utilities tab you’ll find the MailHog tool, which logs any emails sent locally. If you’re testing out any plugin which sends email you can make sure their emails are working correctly.
Note that if you restart Local by Flywheel, any emails from your previous session are not stored – so you are better off checking MailHog as you go along.
SSH Access and WP-CLI
Right-click on any running site and you can open it via SSH. WP-CLI is already installed; type wp to see the list of commands, and q to return to the command line.
Use WP-CLI to handle tasks quickly. For example, activate all plugins on a site, or delete all transients.
Preferences Area
Your preferences for creating sites are stored in the Preferences area. On Windows, access it via the hamburger menu in the top right corner. On Mac, go to Local by Flywheel > Preferences in the menu.
References for more information:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVi13qWdcvE
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqqUDHa3mg8
- https://local.getflywheel.com