Using Local for Headless WordPress Development

Workflow
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There’s been a lot of chatter in the WordPress space about headless vs traditional WP development. I’ve done WP dev for a while, and only recently started learning more about full-on headless development with WordPress.

Are any of you currently using Local as part of your headless dev stack? Would you be willing to share how you are doing this?

Specific points I’d be curious about:

  • What are you using to serve the client-side of things? (ie, the non-WordPress part)
    • For example, are you manually firing up an express server alongside the Local WordPress site?
    • What tools are you using to manage that secondary infrastructure?
  • What’s the general front-end site built with? Any specific framework you are using, or are you hand-rolling everything?
  • What pain points or gotchas do you have when it comes time to deploy? Where are you deploying to?
  • Are there any plugins you are using for your editor that are essential to headless WP development?
  • What OS are you using? I’m on a Mac mostly, but also bounce around to Ubuntu and Pop_OS and occasionally on Windows.
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I’m using Local for Headless WordPress alongside GatsbyJS and Netlify

I use https://www.gatsbyjs.com/plugins/gatsby-source-wordpress-experimental/ to wire WordPress to my Gatsby site which is managed with Github and then use Netlify Dev to build and deploy my site to Netlify’s hosting (I’m using the free tier just fine) for my website.

I’m essentially hosting my website free using this strategy.

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Thanks for sharing that! I just installed Netlify Dev and tried it out and it’s definitely a cool tool!

From their Github repo, it seems like it’s spinning up a node.js server, which is clever since that means that they don’t need to wrangle with managing the permissions of an Nginx or Apache daemon.

Does your site make much use of images within the content?

I’m wondering if you can comment on if you’ve had to deal with things like priming a production CDN with images or proxying other kinds of content someplace else to avoid pulling down gigabytes of the uploads folder.