Rapid WordPress dev setups with wp-now

We've all been there – the mere thought of configuring a new development setup sends shivers down your spine. But what if you could bypass the hassle and jump straight into action? Meet wp-now: the instant WordPress setup wizard.

Highlights
00:00 wp-now == smart
00:37 Demo
02:17 Customization
03:10 First time install
04:03 wp-env vs. wp-now
05:06 This is huge!

Links
- WordPress Playground / wp-now: https://github.com/WordPress/playground-tools/tree/trunk/packages/wp-now
- Flynt (WordPress Starter Theme): https://flyntwp.com/

Speaker 1: 0:00

WP Now lets you spin up WordPress in a second. Wow, so you can start development environments really fast and don't worry about everything that you usually have to take care of. I want to see it. Ok. It's best if you have something that you want to work on, because WP Now is really smart Depending on in what folder you execute it, it will load a different environment.

Speaker 1: 0:20

Here, you can see, it's like plug-in theme or WP content. So if you run WP Now in a plug-in, it will automatically mount the current directory as a plug-in in WordPress. If you run it in a theme, it will automatically mount this theme. Then WordPress, wordpress development, just PHP, or it will launch a playground. Yeah, and to show you what it can do, I just go to flintwpcom, our WordPress starter theme, flint, and I click on download.

Speaker 1: 0:44

Then I go to the releases and here I have a zip file that actually includes all of the bundled assets. So I'm going to download this and I will open it in VS Code and in here I have to use a Node version, and then I globally install WP Now, npm install minus G. Add WP Now, slash WP Now, and once you've done that, you have it globally available. The only thing that you have to do now to launch a WordPress environment is to do WP Now start and it will automatically download the latest WordPress version for you and also the latest SQLite database. And you see, here you need to have something else installed, right.

Speaker 2: 1:28

But now everything is there. Wordpress was installed, it's running as a database, the theme is up and running in the folder, but you didn't even move the theme into a theme folder, right? That just works, this just works, wow.

Speaker 1: 1:41

And the thing is yeah, it's super quick and super easy to do and you don't have to think or worry about anything. And I can show you now, because we had to download WordPress and SQLite and I now quit the server, so now nothing is running. If I go back to the browser, you see it can't be reached. And now I run WP, now start again and bam, it's done, cool.

Speaker 1: 2:00

So, this is super quick and super easy to do and if you go to the admin, you're already logged in. You shouldn't use that for production or anything. It's just like admin and password are the credentials if you ever need them. But yeah, in order to get something running, this is super great.

Speaker 2: 2:17

Now you can also like install plugins here and do everything else right.

Speaker 1: 2:20

Yes, in order to run Flint we have to have ACF Pro installed. At the moment there are two ways to do it. You can use something called a blueprint, but I'm not going to go into that. But if you open the folder dot WP minus Now you will actually see what it created. There's the SQLite database integration. There are the WordPress version this is like the latest. Then here is WP content with Flint and also plugins. And if you like, need anything in here, I can just copy the plugin from my local disk and paste it here. You can now see here's advanced custom feeds. Pro now can activate it. And if I go back to the front page, you can see a running version of Flint. Nice, so, yeah, that's, that's WP now. Super simple, super quick way of getting a development environment running on your local machine. Can I try it myself? Sure.

Speaker 2: 3:12

OK, let's do this. So a new terminal window going to my www folder. Then NPM install Add WP minus. Now slash WP minus.

Speaker 1: 3:24

Now Was it correct. Add the minus.

Speaker 2: 3:26

G or global installation.

Speaker 1: 3:28

So this also takes a little bit because, like it's based on Wasm, it downloads the Wasm files for all the PHP versions, and all of these are around 10 megabytes each. Then the initial run takes a little bit, but then it's like super fast.

Speaker 2: 3:41

OK, let me just make a directory here where I press test and then WP minus, now start. What? Yeah Nice, it worked.

Speaker 1: 3:56

With a database and with everything you need.

Speaker 2: 3:58

Cool With the admin area and I'm locked in already. Cool. Can we use this now for our developments.

Speaker 1: 4:06

I mean that is kind of the goal right. I would maybe wait a little bit to go all in for a bigger team and so on, just because it's like still in an early stage. It should be at some point a replacement for WP-NV, which is another tool to launch quickly dev environments on your machine. But this is based on Docker, so you have to have Docker installed and Docker compose. It needs to download several hundred megabytes all the time for the images, if something updates, and so on. So the experience with WP-NV is not as nice as it is with WP-NV.

Speaker 1: 4:40

But it is based on Wasm, so PHP was compiled to Wasm so that it can run in the browser, but it can also run in Node, so there might be some functions that you cannot use in PHP. Then it uses SQLite instead of MySQL as a database. There is an official plug-in for that, but it's also still alpha, beta version kind of. But in order to work on some minor things quickly and I know like do you remember when we went to WordCamp a few years back in Berlin where we wanted to contribute to WordPress and setting up the environments?

Speaker 2: 5:14

That was so hard yeah exactly. It took us, like the first half an hour to just like set up the environment before we could do anything, and that's so cool. Now Great.

Speaker 1: 5:23

So if you use local WordPress, please try this out and also give feedback to the developers at WordPress and Automatic and actually I don't know if this is an Automatic project, so give feedback to the developers from WordPress Playground, which aims to get WordPress into the browser right for like demo purposes and so on. And, yeah, help out, make this stable and awesome. I mean it is already awesome, but make it more awesome, yeah.

Siegfried, deploy!

Rapid WordPress dev setups with wp-now

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