Whats a good way to approach a development environment when working with Magento?

I am working on a multi-site Magento implementation and I need suggestions.

I am working on a dual core 1.8ghz machine at work with 3GB ram and have found it to be very slow when using MAMP for my personal development environment, so I have set up a virtual machine using CentOS that mimics the actual staging and production server.

The problem is I have to do my changes, commit them to SVN and then update the repository on my virtual server w开发者_JS百科hich is using a crap load of production time. This Magento implementation is a multi site/store so it uses a lot of RAM and I need a stable file system with speed.

I am on a Windows XP Pro machine using WAMP normally but like I said I have found that to be slow. Is there any way I could develop it on my machine without it slowing down every other process?

I have my IDE (Aptana) open and most the time Thunderbird open as well as MySQL Workbench so I have a lot of programs running and the Virtual Machine dedicates those resources, but like I said it it tedious to continuously update the repository.

Can any Magento or expert developers weigh in? I really want to plan ahead for when I get more projects like this, and I would love to hear what some of you other developers do.

Thanks, Darren

You don't specify that the virtual box is remote, but I'm going to make that assumption here (since a virtual box on your local host would by definition be slower than the machine it is hosted on).

I would suggest connecting to your higher-spec machine remotely to work with the files and testing on that environment. Basically, use it as a development instance and make changes remotely. Then, check in those changes as necessary.

I am very much a Linux developer so your toolchain is a bit outside of my expertise, but you should be able to mount the remote drive as a local network drive, or your IDE may even support mounting it over SSH (which would probably be a bit faster).

Hope that helps!

Thanks, Joe

EDIT: I should say that, if your virtual instance is not remote, that changes my answer a little bit. Go rent a virtual dedicated machine with some reasonable stats, set it up for Magento, and then do go the above. The monthly cost of a virtual dedicated machine is quite low compared to any hardware technology upgrades you might buy, and it gives you a safe place to break things. The downside to this workflow is that you must be online to accomplish anything.

I develop locally on a Mac using MAMP (and in the past Zend Server). The IDE of my choice is Netbeans. I highly suggest you checkout (no pun intended) Git for doing development work.

I have a server that I use for production and staging. The production and staging have two different databases. A Git central repo also resides on this server.

Essentially, I do my modules and dev work locally on my Mac. I try upgrades and such, then use Git to commit them and push them to the central repo on the server. Once there, I merge the changes into the staging server and test, test, test. If everything is cool, I then pull (merge) the changes into production.

This has served my purposes quite well and I have not had a botched upgrade or anything... if something goes wrong you just rollback the changes in Git. You did make a dump of the DB before upgrading correct :)

As you get more sophisticated you can start using phing to do some automated roll out of your code, but that is another story all together.

Best of luck!