Nitro 2 for Craft CMS Local Development

Craft Nitro is a Docker-based local hosting solution by Pixel & Tonic, the developers of Craft.

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Craft Nitro is a Dock­er-based local host­ing solu­tion by Pix­el & Ton­ic, the devel­op­ers of Craft. It is designed as an offi­cial­ly-sup­port­ed way to han­dle local devel­op­ment of Craft CMS web­site builds, as well as when work­ing on plu­g­in development.

Craft Nitro replaces the need for tools like MAMP, XAMPP, WAMP, or Lar­avel Valet.

Because it is built on top of Dock­er, Nitro doesn’t use your sys­tem soft­ware libraries (like PHP or MySQL) and instead spins up a ded­i­cat­ed set of Dock­er con­tain­ers to han­dle that software.

Why does this matter?

By using a Dock­er-based local devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment, you can:

  • peg your PHP, MySQL or Post­gres ver­sions to the ver­sions you use in production
  • every project has its own devel­op­ment environment
  • Noth­ing breaks when updat­ing your com­put­er oper­at­ing system

How is Nitro dif­fer­ent than oth­er Dock­er-based localhosting?

Nitro is built to do a spe­cif­ic job: reli­ably han­dle local devel­op­ment for Craft CMS projects. It uses Dock­er behind the scenes but you don’t need to mess with the tool­ing you would in a typ­i­cal hand-rolled Dock­er setup. 

Addi­tion­al­ly, you don’t have any extra files in your Craft project.

Final­ly, Nitro is devel­oped and main­tained by the team behind Craft CMS, so any improve­ments, fix­es, or updates aren’t a bur­den you or your team have to car­ry. You can rest assured that there’s some­one else han­dling that.

Is Craft Nitro Right for Me?

How do you know if Nitro is right for you?

  • You’re new to Craft CMS and don’t yet have a local devel­op­ment environment.
  • You’ve been hav­ing issues keep­ing your local devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment run­ning properly. 
  • You work on a team and you want to uni­fy every­one under one type of local host­ing envi­ron­ment and tool.
  • You pri­mar­i­ly do Craft CMS project development.
  • You’ve heard about the ben­e­fits of using Dock­er, but you don’t want to come up with and man­age your own Dock­er setup.

Ready to try it? Learn how to install and use Nitro in our free 13-part course.