The ultimate Magento local development environment

The perfect Tooling

Now let's have a look at which software pieces do you need for fast and qualitative development of Magento Extensions:

• PhpStorm: since many years now the state-of-the-art IDE for PHP, this software is worth every penny and is continually updated every few months
• Magicento: the plugin that makes PhpStorm incredible useful for Magento by providing auto-completion, automatically generating module structure and many more features.
• PHP Inspections (EA Extended): also a plugin for PhpStorm that massively supports you in writing correct, clean and effective code. I basically use this in conjunction with the code sniffer and the mess detector (see below)
• PhpCodesniffer in combination with Magento ECG Coding Standards
• Php Mess Detector: easily find duplicate code contents before someone other will find it
• Xdebug with code coverage: run directly in PhpStorm you will get visual feedback about your code coverage
• while in the good old days you had the Magento installation completely directly on your local PC, then switched to a Vagrant box with Magento and now we arrived at the beautiful container techniques like Docker. I cannot emphasize enough how helpful Docker is in my daily routine, especially when switching between different clients or module developments, Magento versions, etc.
• modman: this tools was created by one of the Magento gurus to help maintaining magento modules in different installations – very helpful for testing in different PHP/Magento/.. versions
• n98-magerun: every Magento developer always has to do some repeating stuff like cache-flush, resetting admin password, install specific version with sample data, etc.; this tool is absolutely unbeatable in these things.
• ngrok is a ideal tool if you have to access your local environment from the outside (like e.g. give test links to your clients, access APIs from third-party-services and so on)
• a MacBook Pro ;-)

The perfect Docker Setup

As mentioned above Docker is a massive help in easily setting up a local Magento development environment and also switching between different PHP or Magento versions. Below you will find my perfect docker-compose.yml that I use for each Magento project.

The setup has the following features:

• The Magento Docker image is based on FrankenPHP which is based on the Caddy Webserver bundled together with PHP and boy it is lightening fast - I have never seen a faster development environment!
• It uses Mailpit to test local email delivery. Mailpit is also perfect in analyzing the email compatibility for different email clients (and there are many!)

Now let's have a look at the Docker Compose file:

version: "3.4"

services:
  franken:
    build: ./frankenphp
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
    links:
      - "mysql:mysql"
      - "cache:cache"
      - "mailhog:mailhog"
    volumes:
      - ../htdocs/:${WEBSERVER_DOCROOT}/htdocs
      - ../src/:${WEBSERVER_DOCROOT}/src:delegated
      - ../vendor/:${WEBSERVER_DOCROOT}/vendor
      - ./magento/local.xml:${WEBSERVER_DOCROOT}/htdocs/app/etc/local.xml:ro
    environment:
      MAGE_IS_DEVELOPER_MODE: "1"

  mysql:
    image: mariadb:10.6
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD}
      MYSQL_DATABASE: ${MYSQL_DATABASE}
      MARIADB_AUTO_UPGRADE: 1
    ports:
     - "3306"
    volumes:
      - /var/lib/mysql

  cache:
    image: redis:latest

  mailhog:
    image: axllent/mailpit
    ports:
      - "1025:1025"
      - "8025:8025"