Developing using a local server and domain is the fastest way until you need to share your work with someone outside your local machine without uploading your code anywhere.
Imagine you need to develop a plugin, that will communicate with a 3rd-party API. That service should be able to ping your local site using a webhook to provide you some information based on the activity on your site. For example, that might be a PayPal IPN sending you the status of the WooCommerce payment.
But as you are working on a local site – remote servers can’t access it by default. There are several ways to fix this issue:
- use PhpStorm “upload to a remote server on file save” feature
- use ngrok (npm package)
- use Expose (composer package)
I got in-depth about each of them in a blog post on my site: Using Expose by BeyondCode for WordPress development, especially focusing on the Expose tool.
I've also shared a GitHub gist with a bunch of filters that you need to apply to be able to trick WordPress and make it work correctly with all its generated URLs.
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