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

Typically you would have a local development server that everyone shares.

Answer 2

FWIW, I'll mention that our setup is like what Mr. Matt described. Each dev gets his own personal sandbox to mess with, with its own webserver and DB. On the verge of release, version-controlled code is snapshot/branched and moved to a staging server which is supposed to mimic the real live environment as closely as possible. Testing ensues, then the release is made to a production environment.

For my own personal (non-work-related) projects, I develop locally, then push live. One or two projects may have an intermediary testing server/environment between development and public/live.

Answer 3

I've found that runing a local web server, with remote DB works best. DB replication/ synchronisation is a pain, so I'd only work with a local DB if I really had to.

Working with a local web server though removes all the annoyance and slowness of uploading pages/ code between changes.

Answer 4

Another reason to work locally is that everything runs faster. This translates into faster development. Network lag can be productivity killer!

Answer 5

I'm a one-man shop; I have both a remote server and a local server.

I use the local server for quick prototyping and the initial development cycle where I'm making lots of changes and need to test them quickly. When it gets to a roughly-alpha stage, I'll set up a custom sub-host for the project and deploy to my server. There are certain features that simply can't be tested locally--i.e. e-mail-based user registration--and so these features get developed on the remote server. Since it's MINE, and not a real deployment, it's still mostly lag-free. Since I have a VPS, I have full control of the development environment on both machines.