Creating a test environment for an existing website

Question

So I have an employer who currently operated their website with no testing server whatsoever. All updates to the site are "tested" live in front of the whole world. I don't need to hear about why that's dangerous... I know it is. In fact if this continues for much longer I'm going to develop an ulcer.

I am trying to place a working copy of the svn of the site on my MB pro for testing purposes. The site is all PHP and MySQL so my plan is to install MAMP and run the test copy on localhost.

My employer is worried that by hosting a copy of the site on my laptop I will interfere with the operation of the live site. Is this possible? Is there any way that my hosting a copy of the site on localhost will interfere with the operations of the live website (hosted on a remote server)? Are there dangers in setting up a localhost copy?

Apologies if this is out of scope, hopefully this will be useful to others.

Answer 1

It depends on the site. When I make a site and the database is hosted on localhost / the same server as the web-server, no.

But I have noticed that if you use for example WordPress, you are testing on your local copy one minute and are on the live site the next as the url seems to be hard-coded in the generated pages (in the case of WordPress a setting in the database).

So:

• Always make sure the database connection is to your local database (ideally that is just in one place and you don't have to change anything if the live site uses localhost as well)
• Look out for links / settings / rewrites that direct you to the live site from your local site.