Setting Up Your Machine

TL;DR: We recommend VVV, along with the WordPress Meta Environment addon. At the bottom of the page you can find some dockerized environments, which are more up to date than VVV, to work in some sections of worpress.org.


The basic requirement is to have a local web server on your machine that you can run WordPress on. There are a number of different ways to do that; MAMP, WAMP, XAMPP, etc. The problem with those solutions is that they can be difficult to set up, especially if you want to run more than one copy of WordPress.

Another way to run a local web server is to install a virtual machine that runs independently of your desktop or Laptop OS. Again, there are a number of solutions, both free and paid. The solution we recommend is VirtualBox and Vagrant. This combination allows you to create virtual environment much closer to a real web server, and have it automatically set up everything, including WordPress, correctly for you.

The full solution we recommend is one called VVV, along with the WordPress Meta Environment addon. You can find detailed setup instructions for both projects on their homepages. If you run into any problems setting them up, feel free to ask for help in the #metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. channel on Slack.

Dockerized environments

Below you can find some dockerized environments to work in some sections:

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