Survive in limited WAMP

gitbashAs a vim lover, I had been using vim for everything in Drupal development until I found PHPStorm and started working on Drupal 8 and Symfony project, although I still use vim plugin in PHPStorm. Can't live in a world without the shortcut. 

Recently I took a job from the government which has a strict rules about installing software in the work station. Plus, they use WAMP in their server and local environment! Have been working in Drupal for 7 years, I have never worked in WAMP before, and I hope never again. Well we all know Drupal is not for Windows, but when you have to host Drupal in Windows, there are some tips that make your life easier and you don't have to think about resigning for a while.

Don't think vagrant LAMP box is a solution (I know what you are thinking), because the live server is Windows, we meant to have the identical environment as the live server. Luckily the team adopted bitbucket as their version control system not long before I joined, I started to feel better. Then it is the time to introduce my best friend in Windows -- gitbash. It pretty much provides the linux like bash command line in Windows. Of course vim is in it. I started to edit conf files in apache, restarting apache using the exe file etc. OK, not bad. I'm alright vim everything, just like the old days. 

Mysql in command line is a pain. Well the command is not there, especially when you often want to dump the db from the remote server to local. A colleague told me to use MySQL workbench to connect remote db and do the import and export, that actually works very well, I was impressed. 

Don't worry about git in gitbash, it is design for git command line, I feel like home. And finally they allowed me to install PHPStorm, when I was vimming everything... That's a big bonus although the terminal is not available in windows, I'm much happier. 

Composer and drush can be installed via gitbash command line. I have not tried installing Sass yet. Everyone is using WinLess for bootstrap, I feel like I may just follow their standard until one day I will have enough. 

We are developing D7 in Windows, I can hardly imagine developing D8 in Windows, I should be gone by then :) So far so good, it is better than Dreamweaver, what else do you need then. 

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