macOS Local Development Setup

A couple weeks ago I decided to replace MAMP on my MacBook with free tools for local PHP development. I didn’t find a guide online that was perfect for what I wanted, so here are the steps I used, pieced together from several other guides.

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An Event Apart: “’Til Launch Do Us Part”

Dan Mall speaking at An Event Apart Orlando 2018 on October 9, 2018

From one designer to a front-end developer: I’m so grateful for you. You take my pretty pictures and turn them into real-live websites and applications; you convert ideas and sketches into real things that people can use. And even despite that superpower, you rarely get the respect you deserve. It’s time for that to change. No longer will I throw my comps over the proverbial wall for you to blindly build. I’ll change my process for you. Let’s sketch together more to be more efficient and effective as a team. Let’s decide in the browser more. I’ll learn to write JSON for you. Let’s share stories about new, more modern ways of shipping products at higher quality in record time. This is gonna be great!

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Applying Drupal Patches in Composer

I recently had a Drupal core patch that I needed to use on a site I’m building. This can be done manually using the patch command, but when managing a Drupal project with Composer, any manual patches could get wiped out on the next run of the composer update or composer install commands. In order to make sure patches stick, they need to be added to Composer, like a requirement.

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Using a Simple Python Server for Local Resources

I recently discovered that Chrome does not allow the loading of local resources when I tried to link a stylesheet from one local project to another. Here is an example of what I tried to add to the HTML in my project:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="file:///Users/name/Directory/style.css">

And Chrome gave me this error:

Not allowed to load local resource

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An Event Apart Orlando 2016

Photo source: Zeffrey Zeldman
Photo source: Zeffrey Zeldman

I was fortunate enough to attend An Event Apart in Orlando this month. I’ve posted my complete notes separately, but below you will find some of the key themes from the conference as well as an overview of each talk. You can also take a look at Articles, Links, and Tools From An Event Apart Orlando 2016 for more information and resources.

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Virtual Host Rewriting in MAMP

While developing Drupal websites locally, I found it to be somewhat of a pain to sync all of the uploaded files (specifically images) from the server to my computer. In some cases, this could be hundreds of megabytes worth of files to download, but without downloading them, my local version of the site would look incomplete with missing images.

I primarily use MAMP for local development, and it turns out that MAMP PRO has an option to add additional virtual host parameters to each individual site hosted locally within the app. Using this feature, I am able to add a rewrite rule to have the MAMP look for photos on the live site when they don’t exist locally, removing the need to download the files onto my computer.

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