Installing UserFrosting

Now that your local development environment is setup and ready to go, it's finally time to download and access your first UserFrosting application for the first time !

Clone the UserFrosting repository

Use Composer to create an empty project with the latest version of UserFrosting skeleton into a new UserFrosting folder:

composer create-project userfrosting/userfrosting UserFrosting "^5.0"

Note the UserFrosting at the end of the command. This means composer will create new UserFrosting subdirectory inside the current location. You can change UserFrosting to whatever you like.

This may take some time to complete. If Composer has completed successfully, you should see that a vendor/ directory has been created. This vendor/ directory contains all of UserFrosting's PHP dependencies - there should be nearly 30 subdirectories in here!

Next the Bakery will execute it's magic. You'll have to answer some questions, which will guide you into the configuration process. These will help you set up the database credentials, create the first admin user and install the third-party assets.

If any error is encountered at this point, in the main project directory, run:

$ php bakery bake

You will first be prompted for your database credentials. This is the information PHP needs to connect to your database. If you followed our guide to setup, you can select SQLite and the default path when asked. If PHP can't connect to your database using these credentials, make sure you have entered the right information and re-run the bake command.

Bakery will also prompt you for SMTP credentials, so that UserFrosting can send emails for activating new accounts and setting and resetting passwords. If you're using Mailpit or Mailtrap, you can select "SMTP" and enter the appropriate info. If you are not ready to set up email at this time, you can choose No email support to skip SMTP configuration, however you'll get error when trying to register a new account.

If the database connection is successful, the installer will then check that the basic dependencies are met. If so, the installer will run the migrations to populate your database with new tables. During this process, you will be prompted for some information to set up the master account (first user). Finally, the installer will run the command to fetch javascript dependencies and build the assets.

Composer create-project command is an umbrella command which run the following commands. You can still run them following manually if you want, or to debug any issue :

  1. Run git clone (from the UserFrosting repo)
  2. Run composer install
  3. Run php bakery bake

Serve and visit your website

At this point you can run locally using the PHP Built-in server : 

php -S localhost:8080 -t public

You can now access UserFrosting at http://localhost:8080. You should see the default UserFrosting pages and login with the newly created master account.

Basic front page of a UserFrosting installation

To stop the server, hit ctrl+c.

Star the project and follow us on Twitter

It will help us a lot if you could star the UserFrosting project on GitHub. Just look for the button in the upper right-hand corner!

How to star

You should also follow us on Twitter for real-time news and updates:

Congratulations! Now that this is complete, you're ready to start developing your application by creating your first Sprinkle.