![]() I personally make use of WP-CLI on a daily basis and this is what’s keeping me from switching to Local completely from MAMP Pro. You’ll need to go through their application to open the SSH container separately for each site. You can’t directly just enter in the working directory and execute CLI commands. If you’re making use of WP-CLI in your daily workflow, you might dislike Local. The rest of the applications offer paid versions with more features. If you’re looking for a free alternative, XAMPP and Local are clear choices here. While Local and DesktopServer allow you to customize domain names for local sites, XAMPP and MAMP (unless you’re using Pro) don’t. The major differences between MAMP, XAMPP, DesktopServer, and Local is the ability to manage multiple sites and ease of use. There are quite a few different applications and tools that fit this bill, but for now we’ll be comparing the four GUI-based tools that seem to me to be the largest players in this space: XAMPP, MAMP (Pro), DesktopServer, and Local. We have another complete article covering Laravel Valet, VVV ( Vagrant), Chassis, etc. Note that I won’t be covering CLI-based local dev environments in this article. So we need something that’s easy to use and will do most of the heavy lifting for us. ![]() 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 server. 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 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 a new web server with dedicated urls. 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. It also greatly reduces the risk of making and breaking changes on a live web server. Developing in a local environment lets you make changes to dev sites quickly and easily without having to transfer files anywhere. I do not think it can get much easier than that.An easy-to-use local testing server is one of the most important tools in a WordPress developer’s utility belt. Even setting up Let's Encrypt is a matter of typing a few commands in terminal. It is extremely easy to setup, and the location of configuration files is very intuitive once you get used to Linux. You got to remember, in Ubuntu at least, it is just a simple matter of running: sudo apt install apache2 PHP8.0 mysql-server php8.0-fpm In the end I gave up and just installed Apache + MySQL + PHP the old fashioned way, and I find that works very well for me. Last time I tried XAMPP I actually found it to be confusing and complicated, since stuff was stored in non-standard locations. This was before the time of social media FYI, so the tone was very rough on these forums - if you asked a question before Googling and doing your homework, you would be crushed! I think I even tried it out a few times, but the nerds, at the time - those hanging out on the forums - was advising people to install servers manually, since they would learn more, so that was what I did. ![]() Back when I started out learning how to setup servers, I remember XAMPP being promoted as the beginner-friendly alternative to setting up your own servers.
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