I’m setting up a development environment for WordPress. Specifically for my WordPress site, Chinese Immersion Schools, a website I created for parents to find a Mandarin immersion program in their area.
I will create a CentOS VM to be my development server.
Step 1: Install vmWare Player and CentOS iso
I downloaded VirtualBox but it doesn’t support CentOS well. VirtualBox has been very good for Ubuntu servers and a variety of Linux servers. So I downloaded vmWare Player and it does support CentOS 64 bit! I’ve never actually set up a CentOS server so this will serve as documentation for future development servers I need to spin up.
Step 2: Start the newly created CentOS VM and follow the instructions for installation.
Follow the on-screen installer. Choose a minimal install first, then layer in what you need.
Step 3: Install Apache, PHP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin
Follow the standard LAMP stack installation instructions for CentOS. Use yum to install the packages:
yum install httpd php mysql mysql-server phpmyadminStep 4: Install WordPress
Download WordPress, extract it to your web root (/var/www/html), configure wp-config.php with your database credentials, and follow the 5-minute install wizard.
This local environment allows you to safely develop and test before pushing changes to production.