What is Craft Nitro?

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

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

Nitro does not use 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, we can:

• peg our PHP, MySQL, or Post­gres ver­sions to the ver­sions we use in production
• every project can have a ded­i­cat­ed devel­op­ment environment
• Noth­ing breaks when updat­ing our com­put­er oper­at­ing system

How is Nitro dif­fer­ent than oth­er Dock­er-based localhosting?

Nitro does a spe­cif­ic job: reli­ably han­dle local devel­op­ment for Craft CMS projects. It uses Dock­er behind the scenes, but we do not need to mess with tool­ing we would in a typ­i­cal hand-rolled Dock­er setup. 

Addi­tion­al­ly, we do not have any extra files in our Craft project.

Final­ly, Nitro is devel­oped and main­tained by the team behind Craft CMS, so any improve­ments, fix­es, or updates are not a bur­den we have to car­ry. We can rest assured that there is some­one else han­dling that.