Local Environment: Consider switching to wp-env instead of a custom environment.

[youknowriad]

WordPress Develop is using a docker based environment but it's implemented in a very adhoc way.
What's preventing us from just using wp-env instead?
I understand that a migration might not be straightforward, but I'm curious to understand if there are any blockers.

[swissspidy]

This is probably best discussed in a make/core post with a concrete proposal.

I’d much rather move away from Docker though. See: ​https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/11/24/wordpress-development-environment/

In my experience, wp-env is not well maintained, buggy, and not nearly as capable as the local environment (lack of feature parity). The local env has a variety of Docker images for all sorts of PHP versions and extensions. You can also quickly switch between src and build, and run Multisite (which wp-env doesn’t support). wp-env doesn‘t even support Memcached and I was actually told it is out of scope for the project.

[youknowriad]

I don't have the same experience for wp-env, I've been using it for years and had very few issues (mostly unrelated with the tool itself).

That said, I'm curious when you say "lack of feature parity"

Multisite (which wp-env doesn’t support

I think that's a good point, would love to have that in wp-env.

You can also quickly switch between src and build

This is for me another issue in Core's environment but I think it's also better addressed in its own proposal / ticket. I think the fact that we have two folders is a problem but maybe let's not derail the discussion.

[youknowriad]

The other thing I want to mention is that wp-env is the official local environment tool maintained by Core (in addition to wp-now), so it might have issues, but I don't see why we'd maintain two different environments. It just doesn't make sense for me.

[johnbillion]

I think we need to assess the features, requirements, advantages, and disadvantages of both tools before we consider whether we need to standardise on one or the other.