WordPress development tricks

Expanding on Moving a WordPress instance by hand, here’s my list of hacks and tricks necessary for managing local WordPress instances.

Send PHP development server (‘wp server’) logs to a separate file

1. In php-cli’s php.ini (should be somewhere under /etc/php), set:
   log_errors = On
error_log = /var/log/php_errors.log
2. sudo chmod 777 /var/log/php_errors.log (yeah, whatever)

Catch emails

1. Install mailcatcher: gem install mailcatcher (requires rubygems package to be installed)
2. In php-cli’s php.ini, set sendmail_path = /usr/bin/env catchmail
3. At the very bottom of wp-config.php, below where it loads wp-settings.php, put:

if (defined('WP_CLI')) {
    WP_CLI::add_wp_hook('wp_mail_from', function () {
        return '[email protected]';
    });
} else {
    add_filter('wp_mail_from', function () {
        return '[email protected]';
    });
}

(otherwise WordPress will fail to send emails, saying “Invalid address: (From): [email protected]”)

Use more workers for the PHP development server

This may make things faster, but it may also slow things down to a crawl. Give it a shot.

Simply append PHP_CLI_SERVER_WORKERS=N before the wp server command, like so:

PHP_CLI_SERVER_WORKERS=50 wp server

Kill and restart a hanging PHP development server

If you see pages infinitely loading, just CTRL-C the development server and kill all its workers before trying to restart it by doing:

pkill -f 8080      # <-- Replace '8080' with whatever port you used

Disable Dark Reader

Both in Firefox and Chrome, something in the browser plugin Dark Reader’s logic triggers multiple background loads of the index, which really slows things down when using PHP’s development server.