VIP Quickstart: A Local Development Environment That Mirrors WordPress.com

The WordPress.com VIP development team maintains some of the largest WordPress installations on the web, including Time, NBC Sports, TechCrunch, CNN and many others. Creating a proper development environment is crucial to serving clients who use WordPress on such a large scale, but it’s not very easy to set up. That’s why the VIP development team decided to put together an environment that closely mirrors what they would be deploying to on WordPress.com.

VIP Quickstart makes setting up a development environment a quick and easy process. The really awesome thing is that this is open source software, now available on github for anyone to use. VIP Quickstart includes all the features and scalability that WordPress.com uses to power millions of blogs.

The package is made up of a mix of Vagrant, Puppet, Bash scripts, and some PHP code to create the WordPress.com development environment, plus it also includes all the extra tools recommended for developers:

Ubuntu 12.04

WordPress trunk

WordPress.com VIP Shared Plugins repository

WordPress multisite

WordPress Developer Plugin and all VIP recommended plugins

Custom WordPress.com modifications

WP-CLI

MySQL

PHP

Nginx

This package creates a WordPress multisite installation from the latest trunk build. VIP Quickstart will be maintained on github but you can always get the latest by running the VIP init script included in the package. Developers familiar with Vagrant can use those commands as well.

New WordPress development tools will be added, along with more VIP specific tools. Recently, the team added a Windows installer and support for PHPMyAdmin, which you can find if you navigate to: http://vip.dev/phpmyadmin.

If you want to quickly create an enterprise class development environment or simply check out the technology that powers WordPress.com, have a look at VIP Quickstart. If you need help setting up your development environment, please refer to the documentation on the VIP website.