The only issue I have right now is closing all vagrants at once and not having to close each one in phpstorm.

I can move my development environment to my laptop with doing nothing more than installing virtualbox, the only application I must install.

The key is I use a Samsung t3 2tb SSD external drive, I keep all my data and applications on it, even vagrant is portable when you move its folder.

I have about 40 projects on my phpstorm, each has a vagrant, up to 12 can be online at once, they all close the same speed, a few minutes. No backup needed, the data is all on the disk, I just have a backup script on my PC which Delta updates my external drive index maybe once a week, so if the disk gets lost I can just buy a new disk, this solves many of the problems you have, to being offline working and another being putting sensitive information on your remote server, which the t3 can solve with hardware encryption.

So I hate to seem like a troll but I would say you didn’t think about your set-up right.

I was jammed my entire xampp install inside a Dropbox folder for like 10 months a few years back to try to acheive this but I stopped eventually due to regular conflicts. The files were mostly fine but the database tables would often wig out, i guess because they get written so fast & Dropbox locks files while writing changes. It got especially bad if I worked on my laptop offline and then got back online, I’m guessing due to timestamp conflicts created.

My eventual solution was to install xampp in it’s default location, use git for projects files, Dropbox for media & assets (kinda like a local s3 store) and Heidi SQL for syncing databases.

Heidi made it really easy to set up local & remote environments and sync between them with the push of a button. I still use it for quick manual jobs. It’s also free.

Bear in mind this set up was specifically to resolve conflicts easily, host like 20 sites locally with minimal performance drag, and, mostly, so I could work on the subway. If the laptop was on in the background & remembered to pull in changes from git & the db before I hit the road, offline was super easy.

Anyway, thanks for the great article, imma keep paying attention. Keep us posted o workflow developments.

I have, but the overall problem I had was the database. Larger clients have larger databases, so having to mirror the database when I barely use my laptop, could take an extra hour or so depending on the different type of projects I was scheduled up for during that day.

Have you tried just using a rewrite rule in htaccess/nginx/wp to redirect media from your local url to the production url? making copying media around a thing of the past?

Thanks Jay…just wanted to see if you had done anything unusual or special for your setup.

Thanks for explaining further, I can see that you actually put a lot more thought into this than I gave credit for. I hate to admit but I considered going remote dev when my vagrant slowed down shortly after this exchange.

I just wanted to share a follow up; that after some more tinkering, I was able to really speed up my vagrant/virtualbox VM’s. There were a few pieces to this:

1. convert the vagrant .vmdk’s to fixed size .vdi files (noticeable boost)
2. defrag the new .vdi files (defraggler, small boost)
3. install SSD hard drive and set storage type to SSD in virtualbox (huge boost, no lag at the start of vagrant commands fast vagrant up/halt overall)
4. limit or remove synced folders ( significant boost, especially page load speeds)

So between all of this, I was able to achieve no lag vagrant commands and my pages load in less than half a second for most project. The downside is that I stopped using synced folders and I treat my local dev server as if it were remote, but like you pointed out phpstorm’s new remote capabilities are great for this.

It also forced me to really master my git command line usage which is a net positive. Waiting 20 minutes for vagrant commands is unacceptable, and so is waiting 7+ seconds per page load – no matter what environment you are working in, no developer should have to suffer this. I found most of my problems were related to the windows file system (not supporting nfs), and old sata drives.

I was really surprised at just how much the synced folders thrashed my drive, so I’m totally happy ssh’ing into my own machine to do work, its exactly like the remote process anyway so everything feels consistent.