You will need a text editor to work with October CMS templates, blueprints, and configuration files. While any plain text editor will work, a modern code editor makes the experience much better with features like syntax highlighting, file browsing, and integrated terminal. VS Code and PhpStorm both have extensions made for October CMS, which understand its theme files and plugins.

Giving each local October CMS project its own hostname, such as myproject.test, keeps their addresses, cookies and sessions apart, and lets you test a Multisite project with a domain for each site. A hostname like this points to your own computer through an entry in the /etc/hosts file. addhost is a small shell script for macOS that adds, removes and lists these entries with a single command, instead of editing the file by hand.