It’s worth noting that Automattic shipped a thing called Studio:
… a fast, free way to develop locally with WordPress. Share your local sites with clients or colleagues and keep your local development process smooth and simple.
It’s amazing to me that WordPress got to be as dominant as it is without any real answer to “how do I run it locally?” It’s non-trivial, as you need to run PHP, MySQL, and a web server, ideally in a way that mimics how your web host is doing it. I’ve been working with WordPress for a long time, and a lot of that time the answers to local dev environments have been some combination of expensive, janky, or complicated. Then tools like Local and Laravel Forge came along and made things better, but the more the merrier.
Here are the docs. It looks like it’s all tied into WordPress.com, and it sort of is, but you don’t have to host on WordPress.com for this to be useful. The tech behind it, as I understand it, is related to the Theme Playground stuff, which is a lovely miracle of modern web development:
- PHP runs as a WebAssembly binary
- MySQL is replaced for SQLite via a WordPress plugin
- Web server is implemented in JavaScript as a Service Worker
Laragon is sort of nice for WP locally.. Allows you to load and run multiple versions of things and switch between them. Little learning curve but has similarilties and differences to others in the game xampp/wampp/etc. Maybe something to check out