Setting Up Claude Code for Craft CMS Projects

Before we use Claude Code to build any­thing, we need to set it up prop­er­ly. That means giv­ing it con­text about our project — what we’re build­ing, what tools we’re using, and how we like to do things.

This isn’t option­al set­up. It’s the dif­fer­ence between Claude Code being a gener­ic code gen­er­a­tor and Claude Code being a col­lab­o­ra­tor that under­stands your project.

To get start­ed, you’ll need:

• A Craft CMS project (Craft 5 preferred)
• Claude Code installed (npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code or via Homebrew)
• Basic ter­mi­nal comfort

Claude Code can see your files, but see­ing files isn’t the same as under­stand­ing your project. It doesn’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly know:

• What ver­sion of Craft you’re running
• That you use DDEV for local development
• Where your mod­ules live and what name­space con­ven­tion you follow
• That you pre­fer a cer­tain cod­ing style

With­out this con­text, Claude Code makes guess­es. Some­times good guess­es, some­times not. The CLAUDE.md file elim­i­nates the guessing.