[ad_1] It’s common advice when developing a WordPress website – set up a local development environment. Because of this, there are some great products that help you spin WordPress sites up in a snap. This DevKinsta review looks at the latest, and potential greatest. Underneath that familiar purple hue is a set of essential tools and services to create a local website. From there, you can push your site live to your Kinsta server, direct from the dashboard. In this DevKinsta review, we’ll look at how to set up a local development environment using the tool. Though, the main bulk of this post will be looking at how DevKinsta works and helps you to create sites. A Introduction to Kinsta For the unaware, Kinsta is one of the major players when it comes to WordPress hosting. It’s a top-tier solution that offers rock-solid stability and a dependable infrastructure. It runs off of the Google Cloud platform, and packs in an immense number of features to help you create and maintain your WordPress website. Speed is a fundamental focus with Kinsta. Servers run on Nginx, using LXD containers. If this doesn’t mean much to you, know that they’re both fast and reliable. There is also a dedicated focus on security and stability. There are hardware firewalls in place, and near-constant monitoring of your site in various ways to make sure uptime remains high. To tie everything together, there’s a custom dashboard in place called MyKinsta. It’s great to look at, easy to navigate, and gives you almost everything you need to manage your sites. In comparison to dashboards such as cPanel, it offers top-notch usability. It’s the perfect complement to Kinsta’s server infrastructure. An unmentioned aspect is how Kinsta cares for its customer base. The support provision is fantastic, and this extends to new additional features. This post isn’t about Kinsta’s hosting though – this is a DevKinsta review. We’ve talked about the platform in depth in a previous article. It also takes a spot in our managed hosting roundup. You can gauge our opinion through those articles, but the TL;DR is that Kinsta is one of the very best hosts available. The Basics of DevKinsta Given that Kinsta tries to provide the functionality users will need to manage their sites, it’s no surprise that development is part of the thought process. Kinsta itself is developer-friendly in a few ways. We’ll get onto the competition later in this DevKinsta review, but for now, it looks to fill a gap others have missed. It’s a tool in a line of similar solutions that helps you create new WordPress sites fast. The idea is to make it super-simple to build and experiment with your site within a local environment. It’s more accurate to say that the Docker-based DevKinsta is a suite of tools to help you create local sites. In the box, you’ll get the following: A full stack, including WordPress, Nginx, MySQL, and a choice of PHP version. Support for HTTPS protocols, so you can test this aspect out before hitting a live server. A database manager in Adminer. Compared to phpMyAdmin (the competing solution) it’s lightweight and encapsulated in a single file. Built-in error logging functionality. Email testing that’s a snap to use. DevKinsta is also multilingual, and offers cross-platform support for Windows, macOS, and Linux. We’ll get onto using DevKinsta in a few sections time. For now, let’s clear up why you’d want to use DevKinsta in the first place. Why You’d Want to Use DevKinsta to Create Local WordPress Sites Before we get into using DevKinsta, it’s worth taking some time to discuss why you’d want to develop in a local environment. There are a few basic reasons for doing so: You can keep your live site and development site as far apart as possible. There’s no rush to develop your site, as the local environment means you can take as much time as you need. Expanding on the previous point, you can better reserve your server’s resources. You can better define your development workflow, from local to staging, and finally to your live server. If you’ve not used a local development tool such as DevKinsta before, you might have reservations about adding yet another step to your workflow. This is understandable, because an extra layer of software could give you a potential efficiency hit. The good news is that DevKinsta slots straight in, and in lots of cases will improve your development and turnaround time. If you’re a user of another local development tool, DevKinsta offers lots of functionality, with state of the art tools. Of course, if you’re developing for a Kinsta-based site, there’s no reason not to use DevKinsta. Next, this DevKinsta review is going to look at the day-to-day use of the tool. Using DevKinsta One of the first taglines you’ll read about DevKinsta is how it offers one-click site creation. This isn’t 100 percent true, but it’s so close that the reality isn’t worth quibbling over. Once DevKinsta is up and running, it takes a minimum of three clicks to build and deploy a new WordPress site within your local environment: As an aside, if you’re using a dark mode on your computer, DevKinsta looks odd given that the site itself is full of lots of white and purple! Of course, this doesn’t affect the tool at all. When you first power up DevKinsta, you come to the Sites screen. This is an overview of all of the sites you’ve created, and there are three options to open your site. You can open the front end, the site’s folder on your system, and the site’s wp-admin page. There’s also a traffic light menu that lets you delete the site, and open the database manager: Clicking on a site from the list opens a Site Info panel, which has everything you’ll need to manage your site on a few levels: The great benefit of this this section (apart from the super layout) is that
Continue reading