After about three months of using LocalWP I switched back to Laravel Valet yesterday. LocalWP just made my workflow a bit tedious:

The Site Shell works, but I just wish wp worked in the site folder.

Turns out creating a site for each context (at work) resulted in about 20 sites being created this quarter. This turned out to feel really inefficient.

Blueprints turned out to be hard to maintain. Not that it’s super hard, but it became a nuncance to update them and prune old ones.

Don’t get me wrong, LocalWP is great. Totally. But here’s what I’m doing now:

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I have one site in Valet for my work (affiliatewp-dev) and it’s setup just the way I like it. One WordPress install. One setup. No blueprints.

The repo I work on, mostly, is symlinked in my ~/Repos folder (I use ghq to manage repos). Now, I just have one repo… all my work… one place.

To “switch” between cases I just use a command that uses wp to export the DB and re-setup WP at a blank slate. I can switch back and forth through databases using a command I setup called wpdbs. It just exports the DB and imports the other by name. I can switch contexts this way much easier with one WP install and one repo cloned… and of course switch branches at will.

This was my old setup, and it turned out to feel more intuitive and easier to work with. I thought LocalWP would make development feel easier, but it didn’t.

If you’re curious about wpdbs checkout my dotfiles.