I just spent part of the day setting up and testing my local sandbox environment using the following tools.
Operating System
Peppermint 8 running LAMP and WordPress
Plugins
WP Local Toolbox – Creates the Admin Bar notification so I know I’m still in the right place just in case I end up on my live server
Normally I won’t use plugins that haven’t been updated in the last year or so but this is just for testing code and looking for conflicts.
Debug Bar – It’s always happy hour at this bar. Used to hunt down more information and make sure everything is nice and lean.
Other tools
I’m also using phpMyAdmin to drop and import tables. I could do this in the terminal but hitting those red buttons is a lot more fun.
Never name your kid DROP tables. xkcd
I drop everything except wp_usermeta and wp_users
wp_commentmeta
wp_comments
wp_links
wp_options
wp_postmeta
wp_posts
wp_termmeta
wp_terms
wp_term_relationships
wp_term_taxonomy
I then import my site’s sql backups after changing my domain references from linuxbookpro.com to localhost so it won’t redirect to my live website.
I also replace my wp-content folder from the default wordpress installation with the one from my backup.
This isn’t a step by step guide I had to do a few apache permissions but it all seems to be working nicely.
Happy hacking.
P.S. this is really just here for me to discover later when I forget something I did.