Develop and Work with WordPress Multisite Locally Using a Production Database

Update: This is useful only if you can’t edit your local /etc/hosts file (using a tool like Gas Mask makes it fast and super easy) and use the production domain for development.

To my knowledge, there was no way to work on a WordPress Multisite network locally while using a production database, so I spent a few hours and created a simple MU plugin which allows you to do just that.

The way Multisite Local Dev works is it filters all get_option and get_site_option calls for siteurl and home values to correct the site URLs. In addition, we define both $current_site and $current_blog globals already in wp-config.php to stop WordPress from querying database for these variables in wp-includes/ms-settings.php, which is the key to this solution.

Currently this works only with sites in sub-folders, but it should be relatively easy to modify it for either subdomains or separate domains.