Setting up a local development environment
Everything we will be creating with Drupal revolves around having a proper local development environment, and with the move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, there has been a more aligned workflow between local development, staging, and production environments. This is evident with the introduction of the additional files and services that are now included within our sites folder, all aimed at allowing us to have more control during development.
For example, while creating a theme, we will often find ourselves having to clear Drupal's cache to see any changes that we applied. This includes render cache, page cache, and Twig cache. Having to go constantly through the process of clearing cache not only takes up time but also becomes an unnecessary step.
Let's discuss the setup and configuration of our local environment to use a local settings file that will allow us to disable CSS/JS aggregation, disable render and page cache, and enable Twig debugging.
