Work Locally on Large Sites with Ease

Today, we want to address the nerds that follow our blog, as this post is highly technical and aimed at folks with programming knowledge. 

As a WooCommerce Expert, it’s common for us to deal with large WooCommerce sites. This results in databases larger than a couple of GB. Which in turn are painful to handle locally (not impossible, just painful).

Unless we’re testing performance, or database bottlenecks, we usually don’t need the full database to perform UI/UX changes to the site at hand.

Enter WP Local Maker. The tool creates a copy of the database with a reduced amount of certain data types (like orders, products, posts, attachments, etc). The aim is to be able to have a local copy with data cleaned up for development purposes. There are all sorts of transformations that can be done before the data is dumped, and the whole process is extensible via hooks.

These backups will include files, database, or both. The vision we have of this project is to become the standard for creating small copies for local work on all sorts of WP Projects.

We’ve been successfully using this tool in several of our large projects, and we’re intending to expand it to the whole community. 

To get started, you can either download the repo, and use this as a plugin, or alternatively, you can install this as a WP CLI package by doing:

wp package install saucal/wp-local-maker

This is in the alpha stage of development, but if anybody is interested in building this together for wider usage across the community, PRs and issues reports are most welcomed.