Set developer mode in Magento

When you're developing in Magento, you'll always want developer mode enabled. It's designed specifically for local development environments, and enabling it is required to have a smooth development workflow.

Developer mode enables a few things:

• Automatic code compilation - Magento needs some files generated, and developer mode does this for you automatically on the fly

• Detailed logging and more verbose error messages - When debugging code, you’ll want these more detailed logs and error messages to help you find out what’s going on with your buggy code

• Real-time static file generation - In other modes, CSS and JS files (also called static view files) need to be manually created, but in developer mode they'll be automatically generated as they are needed

You can find your currently enabled application mode by running:

bin/magento deploy:mode:show

Let's enable developer mode by running:

bin/magento deploy:mode:set developer

Important note: Never run developer mode in production! While it's perfect for local dev, it's significantly slower and less secure than production mode, among many other reasons.