Skip to main content

Yoast SEO Development: Tools

This page describes the tools used at Yoast when developing the various plugins and libraries.

note

These instructions assume you're working with OSX.

Generic tools​

Homebrew​

Homebrew is a package manager for OSX, similar to apt, yum, and pip. It allows you to easily install and update software from the command line.

Installing Homebrew is pretty straight-forward. You just open your terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and run the following command:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Tools for building​

When developing on a Mac, it's advised to install some additional development tools (Xcode command line tools, autoconf, automake, and libtool for building code from source:

xcode-select --install
brew install autoconf automake libtool

Iterm2 and Oh-My-Zsh (optional)​

iTerm2 is a replacement for the default terminal application that can be found on Mac OSX. The reason we suggest you install this is because it adds a lot of extra features when working in your terminal. Click here to see what kind of snazzy features are included!

Oh-My-Zsh is a shell for your command line that adds certain features that can't be done in a regular shell without a lot of hassle. It also allows you to more easily manage your zsh configurations.

You can install both by running:

brew install --cask iterm2
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

After installing both you'll want to change your shell from bsh to zsh by running chsh -s /bin/zsh. Otherwise you won't get to see all those snazzy features from Oh-My-Zsh.

Example:

  • ZSH can display the current active Git branch in your shell.
  • Better auto-completion for directories and filenames.

Git / GitHub​

Within Yoast, Git is used for version control. Don't know how Git works? Check out this tutorial. Our Git repositories are all hosted on GitHub. If you don't have one already, go and create an account.

Install Git by running:

brew install git

Documentation on how to configure your local Git setup and how to add your SSH key to GitHub can be found here and here.

Suggestion: Add a global git ignore file so you don't accidentally add system files like .DS_Store to the repository.

Local​

At Yoast, we make use of Local as the foundation for our development setup.

  • Go to Flywheel's preferences » Advanced » Router Mode and set it to "Site Domains".
  • Create a new site, call it basic.wordpress.test.
  • Optional: make sure your browser / system trusts the SSL certificate of the newly created site.

Problems with provisioning through Local? This command to install Rosetta helps if you're on a different chipset than the one Local (or any other software) was developed for:

softwareupdate --install-rosetta

Sequel Pro​

To manage and search your database in an easy and quick way, Sequel Pro is the tool to use. You can download the latest version from their website.

To find out how to connect to the Docker database, check out the instructions on the Plugin Development Docker repository.

gettext​

gettext is a GNU internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) library. At the time of writing this package is required for building the wordpress-seo plugin.

brew install gettext
brew link gettext --force

Project tools​

PHP​

As the plugins are written in PHP, it is necessary to have PHP locally installed. We currently develop our plugins in PHP 7.4. As that's not part of brew, you will need to add the unofficial Homebrew PHP tap first before installing PHP:

brew tap shivammathur/php
brew install php@7.4

PECL​

PHP extensions are distributed through PECL. PECL is installed with PHP, but you may need to make it accessible on your computer's path. Find the PHP bin directory (which should follow the pattern below), and add that to the PATH variable as follows:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/Cellar/php@7.4/7.4.33_4/bin/

Brew PHP Switcher (optional)​

note

Currently only usable with Homebrew.

Brew PHP Switcher is a simple shell script to switch your Apache and CLI quickly between major versions of PHP. Useful if you support multiple products/projects that are built using either brand new or old legacy PHP functionality.

Assuming you're running the latest version of PHP and want to downgrade to an earlier version, you can do the following:

  • Install PHP 7.2 (or older) with brew install php@7.2
  • Install Brew PHP Switcher brew install brew-php-switcher
  • Switch to PHP 7.2 (or older) brew-php-switcher 7.2
  • Reopen your terminal and check the PHP version php -v

Composer​

Composer is a package manager for PHP and is used in our WordPress plugins to manage code dependencies in an easy way. To install it, run the following command in your terminal:

brew install composer

After Composer has been installed, you'll be able to run the following command in the plugin directories which contain a composer.json file to install all necessary dependencies:

composer install
note

To update the dependencies, you can run composer update. However, this is generally something that isn't necessary to do -- we work with the fixed versions listed in composer.lock.

XDebug using Local​

If you use Local as your development environment, XDebug should already be installed on your local site. To enable XDebug in your IDE, use the following steps.

Make sure that these paths are included in your PHP include path:

  • ~/Local Sites/<site-name>/app/public: the folder where the WordPress installation is located.
  • /Applications/Local.app/Contents/Resources/extraResources/local-bootstrap.php: A file used by Local to bootstrap the site.

You can use these steps to include these paths in your PHPStorm project.

Make sure that these paths are mapped to the right paths on the server:

  • ~/Local Sites/<site-name>/app/public should be mapped to the same path (~/Local Sites/<site-name>/app/public) on the server.
  • /Applications/Local.app/Contents/Resources/extraResources/local-bootstrap.php should be mapped to the same path (/Applications/Local.app/Contents/Resources/extraResources/local-bootstrap.php) on the server.

To make sure you won't get spammed by breakpoints in PHPStorm for every request. Disable Break at first line in PHP scripts. Also disable Force break at first line when no path mapping specified and Force break at first line when a script is outside the project. These settings can be found by opening Settings (cmd ,) -> PHP -> Debug

You can use these steps to add these path mappings in your PHPStorm project.

Node via NVM​

Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. It is used by our tools and to compile our JavaScript. Node Version Manager (NVM) is a simple bash script to manage multiple active Node.js versions.

First off, install NVM. After that, you can install a node version by running the following command

nvm install <version>

Check the Node.js website to see what the latest LTS version is.

Yarn​

Yarn is a package manager used for managing JavaScript dependencies. To install Yarn, ensure you have Brew installed first and then run the following command to globally install it on your machine. Note that this method will install Node too, but we don't use that version.

brew install yarn

Just like with Composer, you need to navigate to the directories containing a specific file. In the case of Yarn, you need to ensure you're in the same directory as the package.json file prior to running:

yarn

Grunt​

Grunt is a tool that helps running repetitive tasks, such as running a code linter, minifying code or any other kind of task that could be automated for development purposes. Generally speaking, Grunt is used to manage JavaScript code.

To install the Grunt command line interface (CLI), run the following command in your terminal:

yarn global add grunt-cli

After Grunt has been installed, you can run various commands in your project's directory to deal with various tasks. A command that is usually used is grunt watch. This command will watch for changes in directories and run a set of predefined commands over the source code to ensure it's properly output.

As our repositories use a lot of similar tasks, we ended up creating a repository to bring these similar tasks together.

Please make sure you also check out the Grunt directory and especially the aliases.yml file to see what commands are available.

Debug Bar​

To assist in debugging WordPress (plugins), you can make use of the Debug Bar plugin. This plugin can log which queries have run and which environmental parameters are defined. It can also help you find other obscured (but useful) data.