Sometimes it's okay to do it the hard way

Yesterday, I talked about an e-commerce platform I was integrating with, but I never mentioned the name. Today, I'll mention that it was Adobe Commerce, because it leads into another tip I want to share.

The lead developer from the Adobe Commerce team was telling me how to get their software installed locally to aid in our integration work. The manual instructions were quite involved, so he recommended a tool called Warden to get a working installation on my Mac in like 5 minutes instead of an hour.

That sure sounded good to me. I like saving time!

But here's the interesting part: I didn't use the tool. Why?

Well, I'm not a Adobe Commerce dev, working on the platform day-in and day-out. I only need a single local instance to do some API exploration for a one-time project.

So if I don't have the "perfect" environment with all the bells and whistles, that's probably fine.

In addition, I noticed this tool uses Homebrew to install a bunch of system-level dependencies, even despite being a Dockerized installation. It's installing Traefik, Dnsmasq, and other tools on my host. These are either tools I already have set up the way I want, or tools I don't use because I have a different solution.

So I'm very hesitant to have this tool brew update my entire life away just to save an hour. Instead, I found someone who had a Docker Compose config for a typical Magento install (which also works for Adobe Commerce).

With this approach, nothing special was needed on my host, and there were no unknown brew dependencies, just a normal docker compose up to get running.

It did probably take a little bit longer than using Warden to get going. So it was "harder" than absolutely necessary, but this approach came with less risk and I actually had a better understanding of what it was doing.

If I needed to do this 10 times a day or if I needed the specific features Warden provided, then I'd look at it again.

I'm not just being stubborn, but I also think it's wise to not rush to install a tool either.

Here to help,

Joel

P.S. Are you hesitant to try out Docker for your local Laravel development? I can help you get your project configured. Set up a call if you'd like to discuss.