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Understanding and Setting Up Our Development Environment
Choosing an IDE
Choosing the right IDE is mostly a matter of a personal developer's taste. However,
choosing the right IDE can be critical for a Magento developer.
The challenge for the IDEs comes mostly from Magento's extensive usage of factory
names. This makes the implementation of certain features such as code completion
(also known as intellisense) difficult. Currently, there are two IDEs that excel on their
native support of Magento – NetBeans and PhpStorm.
Although NetBeans is open source and has been around for a long time, PhpStorm has
been taking the upper hand and gaining more support from the Magento community.
Furthermore, a recent release of Magicento, a plugin specifically created to extend
and integrate Magento into PhpStorm, has made it the best option among currently
available options.
Working with a version control system
The Magento code base is very extensive, comprising of over 7,000 files and close to a
million and half lines of code. For this reason, working with a version control system
is not only a good practice but also a necessity.
Version control systems are used to keep track of changes across multiple files and
by multiple developers; by using a version control system we gain access to very
powerful tools.
Of the several version control systems available (Git, SVN, Mercurial), Git deserves
special attention due to its simplicity and flexibility. By releasing the upcoming version
2 of Magento on Github, a Git hosting service, the Magento core development team has
recognized the importance that Git has among the Magento community.
For more information on Magento2, please visit
https://github.com/magento/magento2.
Github now includes a .gitignore file specifically for Magento, which will ignore
all the files in the Magento core and only keep track of our own code.
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