Web developers - Is it better to do development on your local machine or on a remote host?

Question

What are the pro/cons of doing web development on your local machine rather than on a centralized development server? For those that do dev on your local machine, how do you kee

Answer 1

Develop locally. Note the dates on answers to the contrary. Make no mistake that they are very out of date.

Let's set the record straight. This question continues to be asked a decade later, and some folks continue to promulgate outdated notions. Read the accepted answer. Safe to say it's incontrovertible these days. The 'cons' to local development mentioned in various answers have been reasonably well resolved in the intervening decade.

But YIKES! Some answers to this question describe developing on production, a serious escalation of the risks. To be clear: strictly avoid developing on production. (I'm confident those developers no longer advocate it. Upvotes on outdated answers should probably expire. Perhaps those who voted will come back and indicate their latest thinking.)

Recommended solutions beyond those mentioned in the accepted answer:

• Containerize your development workflow if you can (e.g. try Docker).
• Avoid pushing databases from local to remote; find a more incremental, managed process based in source control. The configuration management initiative in Drupal 8 provides an interesting example.
• For source control, consider Git. If you've put off adopting a source control management solution, delay no longer!