SQLitepress
SQLitepress is the answer to the question “How quickly can I get a local instance of WordPress up and running?”
The answer, about one minute. Clone the repository:
git clone http://github.com/joemalott/sqlitepress your-project-name
Then simply move into your project directory
cd your-project-name
Then fire up PHP server. On OSX this is
php -S localhost:8000
Open a browser at http://localhost:8000 and after inputting admin credentials you are immediately in a new instance of WordPress. With the power of SQLite you now have a highly portable instance to begin tinkering with.
It is NOT recommended for production environments. More for curious developers to begin tinkering with and later migrate over the theme/plugin to a normal instance of WordPress.
Also I used to update this so wordpress would be at it's latest version, however, this proved tedious and so it is likely you will have to update wordpress once you get the site up and running.
Happy theme/plugin development.