At my current job I’ve been the only web developer for almost 3 years. So for that whole time I just used MAMP on my own local machine. We have a 2nd developer that will be starting pretty soon and I need to figure out the best way to set everything up so we can both work on the same project.
All of the machines at our office are connected to a Mac OS X server. Is it possible to host our web projects on the server and have them be accessible via a short url such as exampleproject.dev?
The reason I want to have our web projects reside on our server is because it is always on. So if I’m not in the office I want our other developer to be able to access our web projects.
Also, I’d like to get some kind of version control software set up. Any recommendations? Thanks!!
This is a hazard I’ve seen two companies fall into, and then emerge out of. Your other developer should also work locally (optionally against a common dev database though).
I would recommend putting Subversion or Git on the server. Just from personal preference and both of which work well with local environment setups, you have to push your changes into the repository before others will see them.
You can then set up an automated build system that pushes your code from your source control to the server for common viewing (if necessary).
From personal experience I would not recommend everyone developing against the same code on the same machine. People will break things and temporarily halt development for others as well as accidental code overwrites. It can’t help but get ugly occasionally.
Definitely an advocate of: Work locally, commit often, but only once you’re sure it’s not going to blatantly break the site.
But — If you feel you still want to do the 1 dev environment at least make sure everyone is using an editor that prompts you (or updates) when someone changes the same file. As an example I use Sublime.