24 Jun 2015

This post is now redundant, see Hosted Development Environments with AWS

It's often useful to have a development environment for developing a new project or testing out changes to an existing one. Up until you would either have had to provide your own development server or install something like XAMPP onto your local machine.

Starting today, you can create a development environment within ShiftEdit. Each environment will have it's own unique url and come with full terminal access (including sudo rights). We currently provide a full PHP stack (Ubuntu, Apache, Mariadb and PHP), and will be looking to add other stacks in the near future.

This feature is currently available in the Dev channel and is limited to Premier users only. The reason being is so that we can monitor usage and gauge resources before opening it up to everybody.

To get started, switch to dev channel, then create a New Site and click on the Hosted tab. You will be able to name your environment and provide an optional Git URL.

Your environment will then be ready a few seconds later and you can begin developing. You can open the preview tab to preview the current file. And PhpMyAdmin is pre-configured and accessible from the site menu.

In order to deploy your changes to a live environment you should do a Git push. IF your live environment only supports FTP then you can use Git-FTP.

Update: Bitbucket and Github support have been added. You can link to those services from your account area. Your projects will then be available when selecting a git url.