Developing and testing locally

Written by Matt on 16 November 2009

It is vital to have some sort of local test environment for Joomla or for any website project you have.

Ideally you always work locally, then move all your work to the live site when completed. If you are doing your development on a live site, or doing upgrades and feature changes to a live site, you are playing with fire and it’s only a matter of time before you burn yourself.

I use MAMP as I use Mac and find it very simple, lightweight, and easy to use. If you are on a PC you can try XAMPP or JSAS. YYMV on what you prefer. I think XAMPP is a bit cumbersome, and has a slight learning curve. MAMP is as easy as you can get, and JSAS is right in the middle of the two.

No matter what you prefer, make sure you stick to it. Nothing is worse then doing a Joomla upgrade, and finding your site offline to the world and with no clear path to fix it. Do it locally, before you do it publicly.

About the Author

Matthew King is the excessively caffeinated head of customer service and system administrator for JoomlaJunkie. He loves paintball and dry humor. Matt also sells web hosting and does website design at ColumbusGEEK.com. He is based in Columbus, Ohio (USA).

5 Comments For This Post I'd Love to Hear Yours!

Bruno Says:
19 November 2009 at 11:17 pm
Another great stand alone server to use is Joom3go_1.5. One click to start it, username admin password demo.

You can download it here for free:

http://www.anonsolutions.com/Free-Downloads/

Cheers!
Chris Says:
26 November 2009 at 3:15 am
Thanks for that Bruno – i didn’t know of that one Is that for Windows or Mac?
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Daniel Says:
27 November 2009 at 6:13 am
Hi Bruno, BitNami Joomla packages are free, installs natively in Linux, Windows and Mac and also has virtual machines, check it out http://bitnami.org/stack/joomla
Bruno Says:
16 December 2009 at 10:42 am
Hi Chris,

This is for Windows, I’m not much of a Mac man…not much of a Windows Vista and Windows 7 either

Works well on Windows XP as pretty much everything else works, I use so much software and some from very small development firms that XP is pretty much the standard.

But give it a shot and let me know what it works on.

Cheers!
Chris Says:
21 December 2009 at 12:23 am
Nice one Bruno

I’ll keep that in mind if i ever lose my marbles and decide to go back to windows Just kidding Always good to know what the options are..

Cheers,
Chris
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