The development environment is like an endless surprise gift. You already have an elegantly configured environment, it seems as if it can’t get any better, and then suddenly… you discover a page where the author describes the wonderful amenities offered by the new tool. Yes, just this week I discovered two interesting tools, more about them in the following post.
Vagrant as a pretty good tool in the development environment
The first tool is Vagrant . A tool that in combination with Oracle Virtual Machine creates a very helpful development environment. In the post about creating a virtual web server, I wrote, how to create your own http server for testing web applications.
If I had met Vagrant before, this article would probably not have been written. Why? Vagrant allows you to create a virtual web server configured exactly as we need it. Not only that, there is no need to copy files to a virtual server, just specify in the configuration file in which directory the files of our application are located and that’s it.
Additionally, the server configuration in the Vagrant configuration file is very simple. Finally, I will only add that Vagrant can maintain several websites on the server simultaneously.
Vagrant can be configured by yourself. This is one option. The second is that you can download a ready-made work environment tailored to the specifics of your application.
Upgrade Vagrant to extra WordPress development environment
For example, for WordPress developers, an “add-on” to Vagrant was created: Varying Vagrant Vagrants . VVV allows you to prepare a “fresh” installation of the latest version of WordPress on a virtual web server in a few moments. You can of course choose which WP version you want to work with and with which PHP version. Fantastic option.
Git history review tool in the development environment
Finally, a tool for viewing project history saved in Git. Git-Cola is a tool that allows you to work with git even for those who are poorly navigating in commands and are averse to the console.
In my opinion, working with Git-Cola while code is being developed isn’t practical at all, unless you make one commit a day. For the current committing process, it’s easier to use extensions for code editors or just use the console.
It’s different when it comes to viewing the history of a project. In this case, indeed Git-Cola is the best tool I have seen so far. It allows you to easily browse each branch, and even compare any two commits without any problems. It is perfect for this purpose.
weekly summary
This week I was mainly working on polishing my development environment for a new project. Despite this, on
coding, I managed to save 10 hours.
