Significance of local development environment

Part 3

Welcome back,

Learning objective 

• Understand the significance of the local development environment.

To create a beautiful and functional website,

 a web developer has to write thousands of lines of code, but just writing the code does not ensure that the website is now ready for the user.

 The code has to pass through multiple phases, only after that a website is ready for the user. 

 It happens that we first have to test that website on our computer so that we can ensure that there is no bug or error in it and all the functions and futures of the website are working comfortably.

When we will thoraly test the website on our machine and get it setup then we will put it on the host computer which means we will make the website public so that anyone can use and access it. 

 In other terms our computer is referred to local.

In the previous topic, we saw that a special software is install on the host computer called web server, from which we host the website, now how do we host the website on our computer and how to test the code locally

Does it mean that we should also have a web-server on our computer because only then we will be able to test the bug by opening the website locally. 

Will the answer is yes but we do not have preinstalled web server on our computer, we have to download and install it, so to test the website locally,

we web developer create a local development environment on our system which means that we can do local development on our system.

 Let us install web server on computer and when local development environment is created on our computer then it behaves like both client and server let us now understand that when client-server both are on the same system then in these case server 

 To understand how -client communication happens, we will independently observe the browser which is our client and the web server, both of which will be installed locally on our computer, 

then our web browser sends an http request for the web page to the web server which is running on our own computer then web server serves that webpage with our return code and sends such response to browser browser renders that response and sends request web page to a user friendly display 

Now on the basis of this response, we can see whether the webpage is displaying our intended information or showing any error. With this approach, we can test all the webpages on our website locally.

Now you know what a web server is, how it works and how local hosting works.

In the next topic, we will know which web server we should install and how to install web server on different operating systems.

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