this is kind of a follow up to this you guys:
If I had a need for a dev environment/program that I only wanted to use for compiling and error checking purposes, what would be the simplest one I could use for web apps that run ANY PHP code on it whatsoever?
Hi!
My suggestion here would be to use a virtual machine for those purposes. You can use Laravel/Homestead which is really simple to set up & use or you can go with Docker if you want.
That’s for the “hardware”.
On the software, I’d say you might want to try something like Selenium (rather than an IDE) for testing purposes.
A nice framework to use it with php is CodeCeption.
Good luck! Let me know if you have questions 
thanks for the help. i will take a look. I will come back to you if something doesn’t make sense. the question was pretty simple. =)