Ysiad

Quick notes to myself on setting up an environment for Magento work for future reference.

1. If you’re on windows, you might as well run ubuntu in a vmware player instance. It’s easy to set up and if you plan to run Magento on a linux server, you might as well start using some linux flavor on your development environment.
2. If you’re on osx, you can start with MAMP, but you might end up migrating to your own installs of apache, mysql, and php anyway. I’m currently using MAMP.
3. Whether on linux or osx, use netbeans with xdebug configured.
4. When developing on a magento site, turn off all caching, and use:  rm -rf var/cache from your magento folder when checking changes.
5. Turn on developer mode.