I think that I'm in the right place, but I'll happily move this if not. Anyhow, I have a website up and running via Squarespace, but I want to play with Wordpress, since I know it's a lot more open to what can be done with it. What resources do you think are good at showing a good way to set up a test environment? I've done some cursory Googling on it, and since it's an area I don't know well, I don't know who to trust and who's full of shit just yet, so I figured I'd ask the community first.
If you are looking for more control over your stuff, putting together your own server is a good way. You just need to get your hands on an extra desktop PC. It doesn't take much, even a 5-10 year old budget PC would work for testing your own ubuntu linux server. If you've never done anything like it before it could be a challenge, but is doable with a little determination.
First, I want to give you a warning. Not to disuade you, but Wordpress can be insecure. Just try to make sure you keep your production environnment up to date and you'll be fine, for the most part. (hackers will move to easier targets)
Now for the (hopefully) helpful part
If you're running Windows, have a look at this guide, which will help you set up a local environment on your Windows machine. (not available outside localhost, by default)
If you're on GNU/Linux, or have a spare computer you're willing to dedicate to running a test environment, @PCFixation's suggestion is pretty good. A guide for a this can be found here.
@PCFixation, that article you linked is an awesome read. They've really come a long way with making wordpress easy to deploy in testing situations since I've used it last.
@PCFixation I've got spare machines, that's not a worry. I'm wanting to put a "sandbox" on it for internal use and learning only.
@SgtAwesomesauce not dissuaded at all it's solely for learning and testing, local subnet only, and if/when I'm ready to go to a live/production environment I'll go with a well known hosting provider (I won't have the hardware/capacity to host myself). I'm thinking it would be good to do a full Linux build, but the ease it looks like there would be if it was a Windows OS seems appealing. Need to broaden my boundaries though, so Linux it needs to be. Thanks for the guide links, I'll start digging into those this weekend. I've got to finish setting up the rebuild of my NAS though first, haha.
Depending on how good your machine is, you might do a virtualization server. If you've got a CPU with virtualization extensions you should definitely, and even if you've got an old core 2 duo or something, you could at least do LXC container virtualization, which makes it very easy to spin up servers to mess around with things.
I could, and I've thought about it. But I've got an old Dell Optiplex 3020 with an i5 and 8GB RAM that I'm thinking of spinning up and getting it on the network to just remote into.
For a linux server, I'd either recommend CentOS or Debian. imho, CentOS will be better, because it's binary compatible with Red Hat, which is more or less industry standard in the server world. You'll almost always have an option for Red Hat or CentOS on your hosting provider, if they allow you OS access.
Debian may be a bit easier, but CentOS will most likely be more rewarding.
The Optiplex 3020 will make an excellent server. That will be more than enough for your purposes.
I strongly recommend that you keep your development environment on your own network. An open construction site on your production server can open you up to exploits and denial of service attacks even drain your resources if search engines start picking it up and directing visitors to it.
Find an old computer to use as a home server and set up a virtual machine to use for testing. Assign a static IP address to it and edit the hosts file of your computer so that the dev server has a domain name.
You can set up your development VM on your own computer if you want but it might be less stable if you intend on accessing it from other devices or from outside your network.