Local preferences… under Preferred Environmental Defaults, what does Development Mode do exactly?
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Development mode is a toggle for the Varnish server that’s only in the Preferred environment.
Enabling it disables Varnish so you don’t run into caching issues while working on things.
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Ah, so it seems like it’s a good idea to have it enabled?
Yup—for general development.
Then if you want to test your setup with Flywheel’s Varnish caching setup you can disable it.
Perhaps this explanation could be within the settings panel? Or a little “i” with the details when you hover over? This took some googling to find the explanation 
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Hey Scott,
I’ve just made a note for that.
Thanks for the feedback!
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OMG… this explains so much confusion.
FWIW, I feel strongly that Varnish should be off by default on a local server. I love that we can turn it on, but ugh I had no idea and that explains so much confusion… so much…
Is Varnish in usage for both Apache and Nginx or just Apache?
Dev Mode is only available on the “Preferred” environment which uses nginx.
You are right, we need that change in next update.
I’ve never seen an on/off slider stuck in the middle 
Clicking this button is doing nothing for me on the latest version of Local.
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I’ve seen this too… clicking on a site the toggle is temporarily in the middle, but then moves to the right. There’s a delay.
Hey @bigskillet,
Right now that’s intentional since it checks the Dev Mode status after clicking on the site.
We’ll probably save this value sometime in the future so it’s not quite so jarring.
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It would be great to have Varnish (also PHP 7.3, MySQL 5.7 and MariaDB) also for the Custom Environments. This way the product could be the Top 01 of all times. Also, it would need some Add-On for Multi-Networks…