Creating a shared local environment for a development team

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I am wondering if anyone has any tips for creating a shared local environment for multiple developers to locally develop a c5 site. We are trying to make working together to develop a c5 site on our local installation fast and efficient, with as few steps as possible.

We use XAMPP and git. The c5 files are the easy part - we just share those through git. However, we are having trouble figuring out how to create a shared database. We would really like to be able to work on one central copy so that both file and database changes can be shared.

We have tried creating a remote shared database on a web host and keeping our files local in our XAMPP installations - but the response time is prohibitively slow. We have also tried using git to share our xampp/mysql.data/site-database files, but we run in weird errors involving the Package.frm file that we can't figure out.

Has anyone successfully accomplished this? Are we thinking about this in the wrong way? I'd appreciate any help or guidance on this issue.

kspitzley