getting-started.md

Getting Started

Requirements

To contribute to this plugin, you need the following tools installed on your computer:

• PHP - version 7.2 or higher, preferably installed via Homebrew
• Composer (PHP package manager) - to install PHP dependencies. Preferably version 1.x (see #5083 for Composer v2 support).
• Node.js (current LTS) - to install JavaScript dependencies.
• WordPress - to run the actual plugin.
• Docker Desktop and Docker Compose - for using the local environment

You should be running a Node version matching the current active LTS release or newer for this plugin to work correctly. You can check your Node.js version by typing node -v in the Terminal prompt.

If you have an incompatible version of Node in your development environment, you can use nvm to change node versions on the command line:

nvm install

Local Environment

Check out the Local Environment document.

Development

First of all, you need to make sure that all PHP and JavaScript dependencies are installed:

Install Composer by following installation instructions, and then ensure to downgrade to version 1:

composer self-update --1

Install all the required composer packages, run:

composer install

Install all the required npm packages, run:

npm install

Whether you use the pre-existing local environment or a custom one, any PHP code changes will be directly visible during development.

However, for JavaScript this involves a build process. To watch for any JavaScript file changes and re-build it when needed, you can run the following command:

npm run dev

This way you will get a development build of the JavaScript, which makes debugging easier.

To get a production build, run:

npm run build:js

To run a local instance of WordPress, in a separate terminal:

npm run env:start