How to Install Craft Nitro

Installing Craft Nitro on macOS requires Dock­er, so that means we need first to have Dock­er Desk­top for Mac installed and work­ing. This a free macOS appli­ca­tion via the Dock­er project.

Installing Dock­er Desktop

To install Dock­er Desk­top, go to the Dock­er Desk­top page on Dock​er​.com and grab the down­load for Mac.

Note that the require­ments for installing Dock­er Desk­top are that we are run­ning macOS 10.14 or new­er. That cov­ers three ver­sions of macOS going back to Mojave.

We also want to be sure we have at least 4 GB of RAM (but ide­al­ly more). Dock­er is RAM-hun­gry, so if we have an old­er Mac with 16 GB or less mem­o­ry, we might see some slow­downs as we use Dock­er. Every com­put­er is dif­fer­ent, and it depends on the demands oth­er appli­ca­tions put on the RAM.

Once the pack­age down­load is com­plete, we drag the Dock­er appli­ca­tion to the Appli­ca­tions direc­to­ry and then launch it.

At this point, Nitro will do every­thing else for us. One tweak we may want to make is increas­ing the amount of RAM Dock­er Desk­top is allowed to con­sume. The default set­ting might not be enough RAM, so we could have con­tain­ers exit­ing if we have sev­er­al con­tain­ers running.

With Dock­er Desk­top installed, we can now move to install Nitro. There are two ways to install Nitro: via Brew and direct­ly via a com­mand-line command.

Install Nitro via Brew

Installing Nitro via Brew is my pre­ferred way to install Nitro because I han­dle all of my local soft­ware via Home­brew. Home­brew is a pack­age man­ag­er that installs the soft­ware you need on macOS or Linux.

If you already have Home­brew installed, then you can eas­i­ly install Nitro using:

➜ brew install craftcms/nitro/nitro

We need to make sure we do not run this until we have Dock­er Desk­top installed in the pre­vi­ous step.

Now we can run nitro init to set up every­thing and build your Dock­er environment. 

➜ nitro init

The nitro init com­mand will take some time as Nitro down­loads the images and makes them avail­able via Dock­er Desktop.

Install Nitro via Bash Command

Home­brew isn’t the only way to install Nitro. We can also install Nitro from the com­mand line. We will use the bash shell envi­ron­ment and down­load and run the installer.

➜ bash <(curl -sLS http://installer.getnitro.sh)

After the down­load is com­plete, the installer runs and builds the envi­ron­ment. Using this method, we do not have to run nitro init as you did with the Home­brew instal­la­tion option.

The next step in the process is to set up a project with Nitro.

Prob­lems Installing?

If you have prob­lems installing Nitro, check out the man­u­al instal­la­tion instruc­tions from the Nitro documentation.

Where does Nitro store its configuration?

Nitro stores project con­fig­u­ra­tions in a YAML file in a hid­den direc­to­ry in the user direc­to­ry (on macOS). To see the file, list the files in the directory:

➜ ls ~/.nitro
nitro.crt  nitro.yaml

The nitro.yaml file is where Nitro stores the site con­fig­u­ra­tions. Let’s look inside it:

➜ cat ~/.nitro/nitro.yaml

The file has YAML sec­tions for the data­base, ser­vices, and sites. Edit­ing this file, for exam­ple, to remove a site, could be done man­u­al­ly and then just run nitro apply to apply the updat­ed set­tings to the Nitro Dock­er setup.