Introduction

We are so used to deal with our Wordpress set, that it is common to presume as usual to develop a web site remotely. But did you ever think about the benefits that could be accomplished by installing Wordpress on your computer?

In a few words: enhanced security, higher development operating speed and connectivity independence.
Not too bad, eh?

Security is probably the most important aspect: if you’ve ever dealt with software development, you know exactly what’s dangerous for your timeline; risks like unwanted edits, wrong saves, “ooops! Why did I press delete?”….. you would know what a safe development place is: a special, reversible environment that helps you test and try-before-you-cry your work.

WP makes no exception: you’re constantly in danger, hacking-hacking your precious resource, upgrading stable plug-ins to newer, faulty versions, deleting posts, testing and exposing to risks your “official” content.

Although a good backup plan will help keeping your work safe and preventing data loss, it will never avoid site crashes and unpredictable downtimes.

Not to mention your operating speed. Whatever the proximity to your WP host, your work will be slower, sluggish, connection dependant and… remote: if your Internet connection is lost, your working environment becomes unreachable, in a snap!

Last but not least, by previewing your blog directly on your own computer you can debug server-side flow, like server-side includes, form processing, or database-driven pages.

That’s why, once you will get confident with your WP environment, you will be demanding for a safer, faster solution to the problems sketched out, aiming for a proper development environment for your blog: a local copy of your Wordpress install, something that can travel everywhere with you and your computer, why not, on a USB stick.

To achieve this result basically we will need a portable web server and database compatible with Wordpress, namely Apache and MySQL. So the steps we will go through are the following:

• install a web server and database on our computer
• copy the online Wordpress contents locally
• backup and restore Wordpress database contents locally
• configure the new environment