Setting up a local development environment
Even though the entire world is in chaos at the moment, we’re nearing the release of a stable Bolt 4.0 release. There’s still some work to be done: More documentation needs to be written, and there's undoubtedly a few bugs to be fixed, but we’re getting there.
The installation part of the Bolt documentation talks about how “developing on a live webserver” is not best practice, and just tells you to use a local environment instead. The thing is, “just” is a terrible word to use in documentation. It makes a ton of assumptions about people’s skill level, background, preferred working style and more. So, instead of telling people to “just use a local environment”, I’m going to write a series of articles about how to set up a local environment on your workstation to get you kickstarted on developing websites with Bolt.
In these articles I’ll attempt to find a balance between doing things to makeshift and going overboard on procedure. This means that we’ll get things up and running on the command line, using freely available tools.
Here are the topics I’m going to cover:
- Getting up and running with the Command Line / Terminal
- Making sure we have a proper version of PHP and a database on our system
- Installing some essential tools like Composer and the Symfony CLI
- Running a webserver
- Setting up your Bolt Project
- Configuring your editor / IDE
- Getting started with Git
This seems like a lot of steps before we get to our initial goal of having a working environment for Bolt. But, I can absolutely guarantee you that the time invested in the steps that precede it will change your way of working forever.
Initially, I’m going to focus on MacOS, because that’s simply what I’m most familiar with. If there’s interest, I’ll make a version that’s suitable for Windows too.
Environment
Written by Bob on April 21, 2020.