Ever been working on a local version of a WordPress site, and you wanted to test out some changes to a plugin without committing the code? I find this issue is particularly true whenever I’m working on a site built with the Bedrock framework. You’ve got your parent repo (i.e. the Bedrock site), and inside that repo you are pulling in your code from another repo with a “composer require”.

Previously, I’ve tried solving this problem via Composer in the parent project; however, any solution I came up with was brittle. Recently it occured to me to try solving this problem inside WordPress. That’s when I came up with my LocalDev Switcher Plugin. It provides UI in the WordPress Admin Plugin listing to switch between VCS and Local versions of your plugins.

LocalDev Switcher lets you switch between VCS and Local versions of your plugins.

Next time you run into the same issue, you can install my plugin via the WP.org Plugin Repo or WPackagist.

In the future, I plan to also add a theme switching capability to this plugin.