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/

More from Bleech
Blog Posts (WordPress Development)
Flynt (WordPress Starter Theme)
VRTs (Visual Tests for WordPress)
Siegfried, deploy! (YouTube Channel)

Transcript

Dominik 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 .

Dominik 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 .

Dominik 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 .

Steffen 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 .

Dominik 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 .

Dominik 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 .

Steffen 2:17

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

Dominik 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 .

Steffen 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 .

Dominik 3:24

Now Was it correct . Add the minus .

Steffen 3:26

G or global installation .

Dominik 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 .

Steffen 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 .

Dominik 3:56

With a database and with everything you need .

Steffen 3:58

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

Dominik 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 .

Dominik 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 ?

Steffen 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 .

Dominik 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 .