When you want to develop a theme or a plugin for Wordpress, it is preferred to do it locally. In order to set up a local development environment, you can do it manually (Web server, database etc.) or with tools such as MAMP (that it in my opinion cumbersome to use). I friend of mine recommended Trellis to me. It makes use of Vagrant to run on a virtual machine and it promised to “Just Work”.

(Edit: I use this setup to develop general themes without having any control over the production environment. I got criticized because the production and the development environment differ a lot and this can cause problems in certain situations due to the different approaches of Bedrock. But this does not affect theme development. It can be different for plugins so be warned (and read the provided link above), that you may run into problems.)

The provided documentation is okay, but I was very confused because the creators of Trellis also have some other tools for theme development (Bedrock). At some moments, I was not sure what do to when I just wanted a plain stupid Wordpress installation. That is why I wrote this blog post to give you a minimal setup.