Craft 5 Project in 5 Minutes

Here’s a quick way to get a local devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment set up for Craft 5. There’s a lit­tle bit of com­mand line work but it isn’t real­ly bad, and I know you can do it. And, the best part is that you’ll have a sol­id local host­ing envi­ron­ment that won’t let you down.

For local­host­ing, we’ll use DDEV, which is the rec­om­mend­ed way to run Craft CMS projects local­ly. I have sev­er­al videos and a course on DDEV right here on CraftQuest.

Before we get start­ed, let’s make sure we a Dock­er engine run­ning. You can use Dock­er Desk­top, which is avail­able for macOS or Win­dows, or you can use Orb­stack, which is free for per­son­al use. Orb­stack is my pre­ferred tool, and I rec­om­mend it for you, too.

You can google for Orb­stack or Dock­er Desk­top and fol­low the down­load and instal­la­tion instruc­tions for your oper­at­ing sys­tem. You don’t need any spe­cial con­fig­u­ra­tion or code to make this work.

Next, we’ll go to my starter project on Github. The starter project uses DDEV and Com­pos­er to make it very sim­ple to get start­ed local­ly with a clean, vanil­la Craft CMS project.

Go to https://​github​.com/​C​r​a​f​t​Q​u​e​s​t​/​c​r​a​f​t​-​5​-​start and we’ll clone the repos­i­to­ry local­ly into a new directory:

mkdir craft5 && cd craft5

And then clone the repository:

git clone [email protected]:CraftQuest/craft-5-start.git .

And, final­ly, we’ll use DDEV to start up the project:

ddev start

When the project starts up, it will install all depen­den­cies and pop­u­late a starter data­base. After that, you can nav­i­gate to the project in your web browser:

• Front-end of site: https://craft5.ddev.site
• Craft CMS con­trol pan­el: https://craft5.ddev.site/admin