While at WordCamp San Francisco this weekend I had the opportunity to sit down with the Operations Manager for ServerPress, the group behind the popular DesktopServer application that helps you quickly setup and manage your local development environments (amongst other amazing features). The first thing I wanted to do was have a ‘Trunk’ install of WordPress so I could get the nightly releases.
This didn’t seem obvious at first, and there was a guide listed on the ServerPress documentation, but it was somewhat difficult to follow, so I figured I’d lay it out here, step by step.
We’re going to use the Blueprints feature here, as well as some command line so bear with me.
Step 1: Prepare your blueprint.
Create an empty folder on your desktop and name it WordPress (SVN)
Copy the index.html from the Blank (Non-WordPress) blueprint to your new WordPress (SVN) folder. On a Mac this is located in /Applications/XAMPP/blueprints
Grab a copy of the wp-config-sample.php file and put it in the WordPress (SVN) folder.
Step 2: Copy your blueprint
Next, copy that folder to your blueprints directory.
Step 3: Setup the site
Start up DesktopServer and choose a new site.
Select the blueprint for “WordPress (SVN)”.
What we’ve left with here is now a properly created wp-config.php file with the correct database credentials for this site install.
Step 4: Get WordPress
Now we can go get the WordPress Trunk code.
Open up your favorite terminal and change directories into where your DesktopServer saves your local sites. Mine happens to be in my home directory in a folder called “WordPress”.
Once there, go to the site you created, mine was “trunk-testing.dev”. Run the following two commands:
svn co https://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk .
rm index.html
*note, the ‘.’ is important in the first command*
Step 5: Setup WordPress
This should give you a copy of WordPress in that newly created local site, and if you open a browser and go to the url (in my case trunk-testing.dev), you should see the following:
Step 6: Make cool stuff
Now you can develop on trunk!
As a note, I’ve had a couple discussions with people familiar with the matter and for DesktopServer 4.0, this might become obsolete as they have expanded the capabilities of the platform tremendously. However, until then, this should get you started.
