My No-BS MacBook Setup for WordPress Development

A new junior dev joined my team last week, and I had to get them set up. I figured I’d just send them my list of tools and a few articles. A day later, their machine was a total mess—conflicting PHP versions, a database that wouldn’t start… the works. It was a stark reminder that a solid MacBook development setup isn’t just about a list of tools; it’s about a philosophy.

My first thought was to build a huge, automated shell script. The dev could just run it and be done. And yeah, that can work, but it’s fragile. The minute a Homebrew formula changes or a dependency acts up, the script breaks, and a junior dev has zero clue how to fix it because they never understood what it was doing. That’s the vulnerability right there—automation without understanding is a trap.

My Core MacBook Development Setup Philosophy

After 14+ years, I’ve learned to value simplicity and control over magic. I don’t want a massive, resource-hogging virtual machine like VVV or a complex Docker setup for most WordPress projects. Total overkill. For 90% of client work, a lightweight, native environment is faster and easier to debug. That’s where Laravel Valet comes in. Trust me on this, even though it comes from the Laravel world, it’s brilliant for WordPress.

Valet uses Homebrew to install Nginx and PHP directly on your Mac and then uses Dnsmasq to proxy `*.test` domains to local sites. It’s ridiculously fast and uses almost no RAM. No more clunky virtual machines. The setup is a couple of commands, as outlined in the Valet documentation.

# First, make sure you have Homebrew and Composer
brew install php composer

# Require Valet globally with Composer
composer global require laravel/valet

# Install Valet and configure it
valet install

That’s the core of it. From there, you just `valet park` in your projects directory, and every folder inside it becomes a `foldername.test` site. It’s that simple. This approach is heavily inspired by the transparent, tool-by-tool thinking I first saw in a post by Carl Alexander, though my stack has evolved since then.

So, What’s the Point?

Your local environment shouldn’t be a black box. A good MacBook development setup is one you can build, understand, and tear down piece by piece.

• Start with Homebrew: It’s the package manager for macOS. Don’t fight it.
• Use Valet for PHP/WordPress: It’s the perfect balance of convenience and control without the overhead of virtualization.
• Understand Your Tools: Know why you’re installing something. Don’t just copy-paste a 200-line script you found online.

Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.

This setup has saved me and my team countless hours. What’s the one tool you can’t live without in your dev environment?