[w0rd-driven]

This mirrored my experience joining a company when my prior PHP usage was also custom code. I struggled for about a month with the current workflow of writing code, pushing it live to a hidden test area, and then getting feedback from the changes I made. Fortunately, vagrant was newish and I learned of the site https://puphpet.com/.

I set out on a mission to recreate the production environment as closely and as primitively as possible. Instead of the full 16gb legacy database for instance, I only dumped the structure and added rudimentary test data. Now my primary workflow involved local, manual testing but the feedback loop was orders of a magnitude faster than waiting for subversion changes to get deployed. Recreating the production environment 1:1 was wrought with large annoying challenges.

Barring full conversion there's various techniques that required less effort. Using scratch scripts and running the local server in phpstorm helps but stripping code down to run locally can be cumbersome. Another option I took was getting lightweight functions working in an environment like http://sandbox.onlinephpfunctions.com/ and slowly integrating them into local scratch scripts or production.

Fortunately, the future at the company involved selling Laravel as a viable option, which makes everything so much easier. I'm a big proponent of frameworks or packages over custom code or NiH as they often soften edge cases or work around quirks in the language.