WP Engine Launches DevKit Open Beta

Those who host or manage sites on WP Engine now have a new tool at their disposal. It’s called DevKit, developed by Chris Wiegman and Jason Stallings.

DevKit is a WordPress local development environment that includes SSH Gateway access, push and pull deployments to WP Engine, Command Line Interface commands for the Genesis theme framework and other tools.

Although DevKit has tight integration with WP Engine the software can be used independently of the host. With Local by Flywheel, Vagrant, XAMPP, and other tools available, Wiegman explains what motivated him to create a new solution.

“I’ve been working on the perfect WordPress developer environment since I learned about Vagrant in 2013,” he said. “As it was never my full-time job, I could never take it to the next level. DevKit gives me the power to do that.”

Stallings added, “We wanted to build a kick ass set of tools for developers building on WP Engine. That’s been our mission from the start, build something that all developers want to use (including us)!”

As what for what sets DevKit apart from the others, “I think our architecture is very different from both tools,” Stallings said.

“Similar to Docker Engine, DevKit CLI is the interface to DevKit. So when we build the GUI it will 100% complement the CLI, and the two can be used interchangeably. This will enable us to build other interfaces in the future too.”

DevKit provides the following features:

Container-based local development environment

SSH Gateway access

Push and pull deployments to WP Engine

Preview your local site with others via ngrok

PHP version selector

Email testing client

MySQL

Local SSH & WP-CLI

Genesis Framework WP-CLI commands

phpmyadmin

webgrind

Varnish

HTTPS Proxy

xdebug

Currently, DevKit’s user interface is command line only with plans to add a GUI later this year. It’s available for free and is in open beta for Mac and Linux. Those interested in participating in the open beta can sign up on the DevKit landing page.