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Setup Your Local Development Environment
6:57Most developers prefer to build applications locally, on their own computers, rather than on hosted servers. Working locally allows you to work more quickly because you don’t have to wait for your changes to be saved to a remote server and you don’t have to worry about issues like internet connectivity.
[MUSIC]
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Hello and welcome.
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I'm Alena Holligan, a PHP teacher here
at Treehouse, and long time developer.
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Most developers prefer to
build applications locally,
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on their own computers,
rather than on a hosted server.
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Working locally,
allows you to work more quickly.
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Because you don't have to wait for
changes to be saved to a remote server.
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And, you don't have to worry about issues,
like Internet connectivity.
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Working with files locally also
allows tighter integration,
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with development tools.
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In addition, one of the best things
about programming as a career,
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is the ability to work from anywhere.
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While all these reasons are good,
the most important reason for
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having a local development environment,
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is you should never be working
directly on a production server.
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Always test your code before it goes live.
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To make use of these advantages, we need
to set up a local development environment.
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This means installing
the programs we need for
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our local computer to
work as a web server.
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Namely, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.
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There are many different ways to set
up a local development environment.
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Most involve at least some
use of the command line and
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can be pretty scary if you
don't know what you're doing.
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I'll be showing you a quick and
simple method,
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which will allow even complete beginners
to get up and running within minutes.
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Make sure you check out the notes, for
more resources and advanced options.
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Let's get started!
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In our web browser, let's search for MAMP.
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The first one is MAMP &
MAMP Pro at mamp.info.
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Click on Downloads and
then Download again.
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This may take a little while to download
depending on your Internet connection.
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Once the file is downloaded,
open the installer and
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it will guide you through these
necessary steps to install the software.
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Make sure you allow it to
make changes to the computer.
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Choose your language of choice.
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And if you'd like to install MAMP Pro
at this time, leave the box checked.
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If you want more information about
MAMP Pro, check out the notes.
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Make sure you read and agree to the terms.
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And let the software install.
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MAMP & MAMP Pro have been installed
successfully you may close the installer.
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Go to your C drive, where you will
see the MAMP the MAMP Pro folders.
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You can also launch MAMP from
the shortcut if you created one.
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And MAMP we'll go into MAMP and
this is where the magic happens.
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It starts our server and
turns our computer into a web server.
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We open the start page and
we'll see information about our server.
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We'll see our MySQL install
which is our database.
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You have your tools,
either phpMyAdmin or phpLiteAdmin, for
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administering the database.
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Also, phpInfo for
all the information about our PHP install.
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For now,
take off everything after localhost and
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this is where our website is.
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Right now, it just says Index of/,
because there's nothing there, so
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let's fix that first.
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Open you text editor.
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And let's type Test.
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We're going to save this
into C://MAMP/htdocs.
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This is where MAMPS stores our files for
our website by default.
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Type index.php and hit save.
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Now when we go back to the browser and
refresh our page, we'll see Test.
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If I go back into MAMP and stop
the server, and then go back into my web
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browser and click refresh, we're gonna get
an error because our server's not running.
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So before you test your website, make
sure that you start your servers in MAMP.
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Now, when we refresh,
we see our website again.
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Congratulations.
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Technically, that's all we need to do.
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However, I want to show
you one configuration step
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that will make our
workflow a little easier.
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Most people find it better to
work in the Documents folder,
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usually within a sites folder, and
then separate folders for each project.
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So let's set that up.
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We'll go into our text editor, and
here we're gonna just add Documents, so
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that we know that it's
looking into a new location.
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So we go File > Save As, and
we're gonna go into our Documents.
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Create a folder called sites.
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And then a new folder called testsites.
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We'll leave it as index.php and
click Save.
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Now we go back into MAMP and
under Preferences,
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you'll see the Web Server tab.
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You see that the document
root shows CMAMP\htdocs.
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This is what we want to change,
so click Select.
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Go into Documents > sites > testsite,
and click OK.
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Now we click OK again, and
MAMP will restart our servers.
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Now when we go back to the web browser and
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click refresh,
we'll see that it says Test Documents, and
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we know that it's now looking in
the new location for our website.
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If I wanted to have multiple projects,
I could set that up with MAMP,
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without using MAMP Pro,
by just changing our root document.
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This will allow me to have multiple
websites, but only one running at a time.
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Let's give this a try.
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Go back into your text editor and
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we're going to say Test Website 2.
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And then we're going to
save this as testsite2.
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Leave it as index and Save.
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Now we go back into MAMP.
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Back to our preferences, our web server
and we're going to change this location.
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So instead of being in this testsite
folder we're now going into testsite2.
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We'll click OK, and OK again.
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Again, our servers will restart, and
then we can go back into the browser.
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Now when we hit refresh,
you'll see that it says Test Website 2.
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So now we have two different
websites that we can go back and
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forth between using just MAMP.
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Remember, if you wanna test out your other
site, you need to go back into MAMP,
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Preferences > Web Server, and
once again, change the document route.
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Now that you have your local
dev environment set up,
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you're ready to code anywhere.
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A laptop might come in handy too.
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Remember to check out the notes,
where you'll find a lot more resources and
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advanced options.
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Until next time,
maybe I'll see you at the beach.
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