I’ve been a MAMP user for years, but at WordCamp Chicago, Suzette Franck handed me a thumbdrive with free version of DesktopServer on it. Interested (and not just because a thumbdrive with an app on it is the way I expect to be handed software today), I installed it once I got back to my office.
Installation and Setup
You can’t run the zip from the the thumbdrive. It’s a 250meg drive with only 50 megs to spare, so because a Mac is silly, I had to copy the files locally and then unzip. It would be ‘better’ (and this is subjective) if the drive had the installer apps instead of the zips. That said, I know they were copying the zips to the thumbdrives manually so I totally give them a pass.
Once I did unzip it, it said it would have to restart. So I shut down everything, installed, and … no restart. I think it was a poor choice of words:
Right, clearly I wasn’t paying attention. Still, it’s a strange thing to warn when it didn’t actually happen! Now, I know what they meant is this:
I hate that MAMP does this too, and have long used the MAMP No Password app to work around this. I’d love to see that added to Desktop Server.
There were a lot of click-throughs, but that it let me add and create a dev website, complete with the hosts file, was nice. I liked that I was able to easily tell it to install in Sites (where I like my sites!), but I didn’t like that it’s bundled with WordPress 3.5.1:
Actually I don’t like that it’s bundled with WordPress. Blasphemy! But really, it would be killer if it could just have a dropdown of options: WordPress, Drupal, etc. Then when it runs, it grabs from the latest build. WordPress does this with latest.zip. Drupal doesn’t. Didn’t know that. You should, Drupal! For now, people have come up with an interesting wget based solution, so that would be an awesome thing to add. But I clicked WP (vs nothing), which is the default. I was directed to my site, where all I had to fill in was username and such. All the DB work was done!
Using DesktopServer
At this point, I was done so I closed DesktopServer.
My site, elftest.dev, was up and running and it was easy to use. Perfect! Seriously, at this point it just worked. If I wanted to spin up another site, that was easy too.
Sadly, it’s not easy to make a subdomain site ala Multisite. I wanted to add ‘foo.elftest.dev’ and I tried to select this be installed in elftest.dev, but got this instead:
That’s okay for me, I know how to use my hosts file, but it would be nice to have this more accessible. After all, the draw of DesktopServer is that it’s easy right?
Shutting down DesktopServer
Here it’s weird. I had shut down the app, because it was done. But doing this only closes the app, not the Apache instance, so I had to reopen (and ‘reboot’ it with Admin rights again) to be presented with this:
Now I could shut down.
Conclusions
It’s a split decision. When I’m using the “MAMP no password” app, it’s certainly easier to activate and deactivate MAMP. However, DesktopServer wins with ease to spin up new sites. For someone like me, who needs to quickly test sites for customers and likes to use foo.dev or foo.loc to test, this is great. I don’t need to hassle with anything, just turn it on, add a site, done. DesktopServer is a little in the middle between easy for newbies and awesome for devs. It’s got a lot of room where I could see it growing, and that’s enough to keep me using it
The downsides are:
- Have to ‘restart’ the app with my admin password.
- Can’t fully customize the website location
- Can’t customize the TLD (no example.co.dv to test an example.co.uk site, and yes I do that)
- No menu-bar tool to activate/deactivate
I’m going to keep using it, of course. The benefit of a fast spin-up of new sites, for what I do with testing people’s sites and fixing them at work, wins hands down.
Comments
4 responses to “Review: DesktopServer”
Good review. Granted, it should be noted WordPress is bundled for two (what we feel are good) reasons:
1) The claim to offline development, really means offline. No Internet connection needed 🙂
2) WordPress Blueprints. You can drop the latest.zip in the blueprints folder (and then some).
Speaking of WordPress Blueprints, you can drop *any* WordPress (i.e. in your language), even include plugins, themes, *and* have them preconfigured with settings and options. Now your “WordPress 5 minute install” turns into a 15 second install completely automated (auth keys and salts are randomized for you, privacy is enabled to prevent SEO contamination, etc. etc.).
While it’s true you can’t do multisite in the Limited version, the Premium version does allow you to customize locations with Multisite. You can even share a particular project with co-workers and mobile device testing (Premium on your LAN only).
That being said, the Limited version does have a few other tricks up it’s sleeve. Including the ability to open up live websites you’ve already created on a real hosting provider for offline viewing, testing (or doing something potentially destructive like trying out a very new but questionable plugin). You’ll just need to grab all your files and a database dump from phpMyAdmin (name it database.sql), zip everything up and drop it into the blueprints folder. Or you could drop a Duplicator, BackupBuddy, BackupWP, or Backup WordPress generated .zip in there too. After all, what good are backups if you can’t safely open them up offline to compare them?
I don’t remember seeing any mention of “WordPress Blueprints” in the install process. And that’s pretty important, actually, since as you say “No Internet connection needed” – Everything I need to know better be in the as-I-install walkthrough.
I didn’t see anything like this – http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/installing-a-local-server/installing-desktopserver/#3-configuring-desktopserver – which would have rocked 🙂 I’ll play with that and see where it gets me.
But speaking of “No Internet connection needed” … There’s a difference between ‘needed’ and ‘totally ignored.’ If I have internet, why not put in an options ‘Download latest version from…’ Especially since you may not have the latest version of WP included (which would be impossible to always magically update thumbdrives and all that).
I’m waiting for someone to have a site so busted I have reason to put that to the real-world test! That’s part of why I’m interested in this 🙂
I’m a big fan of desktop server. I like being able to not only spin up a local site in seconds, but also being able to spin up a copy of a client’s site on my local machine in about 2 minutes. Here’s how.
– In my blueprints folder I have a WP 3.5.2 install and this plugin wordpress.org/plugins/uploads-by-proxy/
– Create my new dev site as client-name.dev
– Start downloading the plugins/themes from the client’s live site in to local dev setup
– Do an export of their entire DB using phpMyAdmin
– Locally, drop all tables in the DB created for my new install using phpMyAdmin
– Import their live DB in to my local DB
– Add the following two lines to wp-config.php
define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://clientx.dev’);
define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://clientx.dev’);
There’s no need to pull down their uploads folder because the database will link to ’em directly.
Typically by the time I’ve done all the middle steps the theme/plugins have downloaded and I’m ready to hit the site, log in and start testing.
My biggest complaint with DS is having to restart with admin rights every time I want to log in to add a site. Other than that, huge fan.
Hi Mika,
Thanks for the review! Steve covered a lot of the issues you brought up in your review and John covered one of the fantastic ways in which he uses DesktopServer in his own workflow, so I won’t rehash any of that. BUT . .. I did want to let you know that you brought up a very good point about the zip files and the size of the thumb drives. We purchased thumb drives just big enough to hold both archives (Win/Mac) on them but your suggestion is a great one, so we’ll be working on making sure the next batch of thumb drives are big enough and contain the actual files on them in uncompressed, ready to install, form.
Thanks for the suggestion!
-marc