Craft is a flexible, user-friendly CMS for creating custom digital experiences on the web and beyond.

In technical terms, it’s a self-hosted PHP application backed by a MySQL or Postgres database. Read more in the official documentation.

Psst! Looking for the Craft source code? Need to file a bug report or feature request? Check out craftcms/cms.

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📯 If you just heard about Craft: Take a feature tour on our website—then spin up a demo project to try it out for yourself.

👷‍♀️ If you are eager to start building: You’re in exactly the right place!

Getting Started

This repository is a bare-bones Composer “project”, intended for use with the composer create-project command. It contains only the folders and files absolutely required to run Craft.

Tip

Our tutorial covers this setup process in greater depth. If you get stuck, give it a once-over; if things still aren’t clicking, help is never far away in our community or via official support.

You can also find these instructions (and some other helpful tips) in the documentation.

The best way to spin up your first project is with DDEV, a cross-platform, Docker-based PHP development environment.

Install or update DDEV, then follow these steps:

1. Create a project directory and move into it:

   cd /path/to/web/projects
   mkdir my-project
   cd my-project
2. Create DDEV configuration files:

   ddev config --project-type=craftcms --docroot=web
3. Scaffold the project from the official starter project:

   ddev composer create -y "craftcms/craft"

The setup wizard will start automatically! Accept all defaults (in [square brackets]), and note your chosen username and password.

Lauch Craft’s control panel in a browser with ddev launch admin. The rest is up to you! Pick up where we left off in the tutorial, or dive right in on modeling your own content:

• 🗃️ Elements: Learn about Craft’s core content types, and how to customize them.
• 📐 Fields: Create precisely the data structure and authoring experience you need.
• ✏️ Templating: Start using your data in a totally custom front-end.

Resources

Craft comes with a ton of official and community resources.