Drupal Local Development Setup/Environment

Question

Background

I have been developing Drupal Sites for a little over 2 years now and I have noticed that my dev environments are not as user friendly and as simple as I have expected. The current process is we have a git repo where we store all the code, then we have a vagrant box setup as our virtual machine to run our local development in. The issue comes along with the fact of constantly having to go through loop holes of trying to get everything to work well together. Or there will be issues with composer (which is getting real finicky)

For example trying to make sure that my macOS version still supports php. Or to make sure the version of vagrant works with the current version of VirtualBox. The biggest pain comes from trying to set everything up in one simple go. There is always some sort of tweak that has to be made to the local system to make everything congeal. Then the whole blt setup process once I am logged into the vagrant is time consuming as well.

I have also taken a Drupal Acquia Developer course but this course, in here the professor said proposed that we should use DevDesktop. This process did seem slightly easier but I did not like how it was another "do it the Drupal way". I understand seeing that this came from the the actual company as the professor software it might be considered best practice but still want to hear more.

Question

I have received an email about the Acquia Cloud IDE which does look very interesting but I believe it is another service that we would have to pay for. My question for you all, is what are some of the best practice that you all follow for local development? Are there things I should look into and

TL;DR

Background:

• use acquia site factory for all sites
• we deploy from local to dev using blt artifacts
• environment is done using a Drupal-VM vagrant box (which gets out of hand and uncontrollable fast when trying to set it all up)
• Since we are using lightning core we are told we must use Macs, I would like to make it so this development can be done on any machine.

Question

• Does anyone here use DevDesktop or Acquia Cloud IDE and have any feedback or pros/cons about these?
• Any recommendations or information of what you all currently are implementing?
• What are the leading standards?
• What technology can I utilize that can be setup or used on any computer regardless of OS? (Hopefully a cost-free solution)

Answer 1

I have used DevDesktop as well as various Stacks. I can honestly say, what works best and fastest for me is a nice and simple XAMPP stack.

DevDesktop is being discontinued and is notoriously slow.

XAMPP is miles faster, comfortable for Dev purposes and doesn't hold you down in terms of Drupal versions.

Answer 2

I've been using DevDesktop for five years and I love it, however Acquia has discontinued support for DevDesktop (https://docs.acquia.com/resource/archive/dev-desktop/). I tried Acquia Cloud IDE, it not as powerful and flexible as working on a local container, and can be especially frustrating because you can't configure aliases, if you are using integrated git-bash. But the Cloud IDE is useful in a pinch. So, I updated my DevDesktop to PHP7.4.26, and I can develop locally.

I still have yet to try setting up Drupal on any other containers.

Update (20220906)

I have since tried DDev and Lando, I found it less painful to setup a local dev environment using Lando with the Acquia recipe (https://docs.lando.dev/acquia/).