A developer workflow begins with having an AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack installed and configured on a Windows, OS X, or *nix based machine. Depending on the operating system, there are a lot of different methods that one can use to set up an ideal environment. However, when it comes down to choices, there are only three:
- Native AMP stack: This option refers to systems that generally either come preconfigured with Apache, MySQL, and PHP, or have a generally easy installation path to download and configure these three requirements. There are plenty of great tutorials on how to achieve this workflow, but this requires familiarity with the operating system.
- Packaged AMP stack: This option refers to third-party solutions, such as MAMP(https://www.mamp.info/en/), WAMP(http://www.wampserver.com/en/), or Acquia Dev Desktop(https://dev.acquia.com/downloads). These solutions come with an installer that generally works on Windows and OS X, and is a self-contained AMP stack allowing for general web server development. Out of these three, only Acquia Dev Desktop is Drupal specific.
- Virtual machine (VM): This option is often the best solution as it closely represents the actual development, staging, and production web servers. However, this can also be the most complex to initially set up and requires some knowledge of how to configure specific parts of the AMP stack. There are a few well-documented VMs available that can help reduce the experience needed. Two great virtual machines to look at are Drupal VM(https://www.drupalvm.com/) and Vagrant Drupal Development (VDD)(https://www.drupal.org/project/vdd).
In the end, my recommendation is to choose an environment that is flexible enough to quickly install, set up, and configure Drupal instances. The preceding choices are all good to start with, and by no means is any single solution a bad choice.
If you are a single person developer, a packaged AMP stack such as MAMP may be the perfect choice. However, if you are in a team environment, I would strongly recommend one of the previously mentioned VM options or consider creating your own VM environment that can be distributed to your team.
We will discuss virtualized environments in more detail, but, before we do, we need to have a basic understanding of how to work with three very important command-line interfaces: Composer, Drush, and Drupal Console.