lightweight local dev setup

In an effort to change old habits, a lot of my recent posts have to do with new tools and working with different processes. The nasty old habit, in this case, is working directly in production environments without source control.

Here is a set of steps to working locally in a really lightweight manner:

  1. create directory for development and navigate to it within the command line
  2. assuming there is a repos already in existence, clone it into said directory and make a branch to develop on
  3. git clone...
    git branch <name-of-branch>
    git checkout <name-of-branch>
  4. install dependencies (bower install)
  5. setup pre-processing:
    codekit (just drag the folder onto codekit)
  6. startup php local webserver in folder
    php -S localhost:8000
  7. make files, edit files, etc.

  8. commit changes to git
    echo ".DS_Store" >> .gitignore
    git add .
    git commit -a -m "message"
    git push --set-upstream origin <name-of-branch>
  9. thereafter, make changes and push them
  10. git add .
    git commit -a -m "message"
    git push origin master


Durability: the biggest problem with front-end dev tools

In the past decade, front end development has changed a lot. In the old days, you would hand-roll, hack, test. It was a labor-intensive coding project. Lately, a suite of tools has emerged that promise many benefits to the developer workflow including grunt, foundation, sass, pre-processors, emmet, docker, composer, bower…

The tools are fine in their own right, but the problem with them is that they aren’t really durable.  Using woodworking as an analogy, the tools last longer than the products that you build.

I was recently visiting a site for a foundation outline theme that seemed promising and found its discontinuation sidenote.

Project discontinued – here is why.

And I quote:

We switched to _s and a custom grid system and therefore don’t use Zurb Foundation anymore. The docs will stay available until 2015, feel free to fork the project on Github.

It’s been quite the journey and we learned a lot maintaining the required+ Foundation theme and it’s assets. We are grateful for all the people helping and using required+ Foundation as their WordPress base theme. Instead of releasing a version that we don’t use internally, we finally decided to discontinue required+ Foundation. This decision wasn’t easy and we tried to free some time for the project, but had to realise that it’s best to discontinue the project instead of letting you wait in limbo any longer.

Thanks again for the support and understanding
– Silvan & the required+ team