Magento 2: Developer Mode

For reasons that are way too complicated to get into on Magento Quickies, while Magento 2 still has the concept of a developer mode, there’s no longer a Mage::setIsDeveloperMode method. If you’d been lazily (like me. cough) editing index.php to switch your site into developer mode, that won’t work anymore. Your only choice is to set a web server environmental variable.

For all the proper grown up, lazy crufy, people using apache, this means adding the following line to .htaccess

SetEnv MAGE_MODE developer

Magento 1 developers will notice the environmental variable is now MAGE_MODE, and not MAGE_IS_DEVELOPER_MODE.

I’ve been told this snippet

...
location ~ .php$ {
    ...
    ## Magento 2 Developer mode
    fastcgi_param MAGE_MODE "developer";
    ...
}
...

will make your nginx web-servers happy. Being a frozen caveman developer, I’ll leave testing that up to you.