WordPress Studio for local development and reference

[eliot-akira]

It's a new tool for managing local dev sites, I think powered by Playground.

• Studio by WordPress.com

Aside from (what I imagine) the ease of use and nice interface design, it sounds like there's a cloud feature.

Share your local work with team members or clients, create templates with your preferred configurations to develop more efficiently

@GabrielGallagher @juliacanzani @nicolas-jaussaud

[GabrielGallagher]

I saw the Studio announcement, seems pretty cool.
I love Laragon and probably wouldn't switch (as a non dev, having all those pesky node/git/composer setup steps magically taken care of is too nice), but it's a Windows tool and not suitable for company-wide use given the variety of OS in use.
The alternatives like WPEngine's Local and Kinsta's new one are just lead generation tools for specific hosts so it'll be nice to see a competitor that isn't feeding the competition and can hopefully attract more community development / support.
Of course Automattic may just do the same thing and make their tool funnel you to their hosting.

[eliot-akira]

WPEngine's Local and Kinsta's new one are just lead generation tools for specific hosts.. Automattic may just do the same thing and make their tool funnel you to their hosting.

Seeing how it's branded as "Studio by WordPress.com", I imagine the plan is to make it easier to locally develop a site then deploy it to wordpress.com. Similar with Next.js and Vercel, there are features that work best on their proprietary platform.

That's an insightful take. Could be related to the strategy of "commodify your complement".

It makes me imagine something like Tangible Studio, a local-first web app (instead of a desktop app like Local) to simplify getting started with site development, then naturally deploy to our own hosting.

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as a non dev, having all those pesky node/git/composer setup steps magically taken care of is too nice

What differentiates Studio by WordPress.com from similar existing solutions like WPEngine's Local, is that the underlying stack is much simpler and lighter-weight thanks to Playground (PHP-WASM and SQLite).

Recently I started integrating wp-now to our project setup (trying first with the new Design module) - with the aim to eventually replace wp-env for local dev and testing.

The difference between these tools is similar to what I described above: wp-env requires Docker to run basically the entire LAMP stack; versus wp-now which runs a self-contained Playground (on Node.js and other JavaScript runtime).

Aside from the simplicity of installing less stuff during onboarding, with fewer moving parts, it's so much faster to boot up the server and create new sites - even temporary disposable ones for testing (and possibly automation).

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Playground is a game-changer, particularly in how portable it makes WordPress sites and environments. It's definitely commodifying it in some sense, to make it simple to run everywhere, in the browser and server side.

For production server it still makes sense to install PHP-FPM, MySQL/MariaDB, and a web server like Apache or NGINX. But the story might change if Playground can out-perform that stack, for example as a Cloudflare Worker or Bun standalone binary maybe.

[GabrielGallagher]

A local dev environment connected to our https://tangiblexp.com hosting platform would be great if we can make that happen!

[eliot-akira]

Studio is open source, so it can be studied further and even forked to customize, if there's any practical value in doing so.

Studio by WordPress.com, a free desktop app that helps developers streamline their local WordPress development workflow.

https://github.com/Automattic/studio

It's a cross-platform desktop app built on Electron (Chromium and Node.js).

Having a GUI to manage local sites sounds useful, especially with deploy to cloud. But personally I'd prefer to run things in the apps I already have open: the terminal, browser, or code editor.

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I'm more excited about the core technology, WordPress Playground and PHP-WASM. It enables a new way of running WordPress as a local-first web app with (optionally) persistent storage in the browser. Quick and easy for local development, demo sites as live preview, or temporary sites for testing.

It integrates well with JavaScript runtimes like Node and Bun, where spinning up a WordPress site is a matter of calling a function. It works well with Playwright too, which runs headless Chromium for end-to-end tests. Recently I'm exploring a workflow with tests written in TypeScript, where it creates a fresh WordPress site every time they're run; and during development, even watch files and run tests on every save for immediate feedback.

The simplicity is so refreshing, not having to locally set up Docker/NGINX/PHP/MySQL.

I'm planning to leverage it for improving developer experience and project build/test workflow in general, for Tangible Blocks, Fields, etc. It would be great to be able to link to a live preview of the newest commit, pull request, or even issue.