A development environment consists of tools to make it easy to write, debug and test your code. In terms of WordPress, you can choose either Local Development Environment or Remote/Production Server.

Local Development Environment is useful when you want to test your plugin/theme quickly. It is also suitable to test your code for comparability across the browser before deploying it to public.

Experts can directly work with Remote/Production Server.

In context to my WordPress journey, I am going to use macOS (Big Sur) with Local Development Environment with following tools:

• Visual Studio Code (IDE)
• Zsh Shell
• VVV + VirtualBox

It’s completely upto you to choose your IDE. I am using Visual Studio Code because it is OpenSource and also one of my favourite IDE with plenty of extensions.

Zsh! you might be wondering why to use a new shell? Well, I do have the same question but after reviewing online, I am pretty amazed by it’s functionality. It makes terminal experience smooth. A lot’s of shortcuts and snippets makes it very useful and productive than default shell. Click here to read installation instruction for Zsh.

Another important tool is VVV and it stands for Varying Vagrant Vagrants. VVV is ideal for developing themes and plugins as well as for contributing to WordPress core. It is widely used by WordPress developers. Read this document to install VVV. A great tutorial to install, setup and develop your first “hello world” WordPress site:

Once, you setup your development environment, you can jump into exploring WordPress development. There are strict coding standards for WordPress development which we will learn once we explore sample plugins.

I hope, this helps you setting up your WordPress development environment. Next post will cover how to start with “Hello, Dolly” simple plugin.

Cheers,
Anurag