Raul Watson Jul 1, 2017 2 min read

HowTo: My Dev Environment

A native macOS stack for Magento development

On this page

People often ask me what I use to develop locally. I have gone through Vagrant and Docker over the years, but for the projects I work on day to day I keep everything installed natively on macOS. It is fast, and when something breaks I know exactly where to look. This is the stack I run.

Everything is installed through Homebrew , which keeps upgrades painless.

PHP

bash

brew install php@7.2
brew install composer

I switch PHP versions per project by linking the one I need. A couple of aliases in my .zshrc make that a one word command.

Web server

I use Apache directly (nginx works just as well, it is a matter of taste):

bash

brew install httpd

Each project gets a virtual host and a .test domain, resolved locally with dnsmasq so I never touch /etc/hosts again:

bash

brew install dnsmasq

Database, cache and search

Magento needs a database, and benefits massively from Redis and a search engine:

bash
brew install mysql
brew install redis
brew install elasticsearch

I point Magento’s cache and full page cache at Redis, and sessions too, it makes a noticeable difference on a real catalog.

The little helpers

Two tools I would not work without:

n98-magerun , the swiss army knife for Magento.
Composer, obviously, for everything dependency related.

This native setup is fast but it does tie your machine to specific versions. If you jump between very different projects a lot, a containerised option like Valet Plus or Docker keeps things isolated. I ended up combining both.

That is pretty much it. Nothing exotic, just a handful of Homebrew formulae and a couple of aliases, but it has served me well for years.

Hope this helps.

If you have any question or know a better setup, feel free to share in the comments below.