A Modern Web Development Workflow in Windows

I’ve been on a mission in the last weeks, modernizing my workflow in WordPress development in order to automate as many tasks as possible and start using SASS, Grunt, Git and Capristano.

 

First, you need to know that I’m a windows user, I like everything about Linux philosophy, but I really hate Photoshop running on Wine and I love playing some games whenever I’ve the time for it. 

 

I’ve started installing git on windows (Awesome),

continued to install Ruby and SASS, one more Console…

Testing wordmove (https://github.com/welaika/wordmove), more modules to install, one more console Cygwin…

 

Come on! If I continue this way I’ll work with 3 different consoles and multiple configurations and installs of each module I needed for each new “hot” thing available.

 

So I needed to find a way of reduce this huge setup and mess.

I’ve poked around a little and decided to install a Virtual Machine running Ubuntu server, with everthing I needed.

– Git
– Ruby
– Sass
– Node.js
– Grunt
– Lampp

This way I would be able to install everything I needed today and have an expansible environment capable of fulfilling my future needs.

What do you think of my choice?

Do you have any alternative suggestions or use a similar setup?

Comments

2 responses to “A Modern Web Development Workflow in Windows”

  1. Moses Holmström Avatar
    Moses Holmström

    I think your choice is the only reasonable one.

    Getting this stuff working under Cygwin is a nightmare, and there’s just no hope trying to use these tools natively under Windows. The situation is really sticky for those of us who want to get development done without succumbing to Apple’s overpriced walled garden, while having the option of playing PC games and specialty software (Adobe and Autodesk, most notably).

    I currently have a dualboot system (Lubuntu & Win7) along with a Lubuntu virtual machine. VirtualBox has a special display mode, which hides the virtual OS’s desktop and mixes it’s windows with Windows’ windows. It’s pretty neat, but doesn’t work with all window managers.

    It’s still a bit of a chore to deal with VMs or rebooting every time you wish to switch operating systems, but apart from giving up gaming and Photoshop, there aren’t any real options. Hopefully Steam’s recent efforts will make Linux more relevant in the eyes of game developers and Adobe.

  2. freelance web developer Avatar

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