Setting Up the Local Environment

In this chapter, I will guide you through the process of setting up your local environment, regardless of whether you are working on macOS, Windows, or Linux. We will cover the key steps required to install and configure your system to run the Adobe Commerce (AC) application on Docker-based environments.

Whether you are an experienced developer or a newcomer to the field, this chapter will equip you with the most efficient tools to work with AC.

Note

You can download a complete working environment for VirtualBox. It was created in the same way as it is explained in this chapter.

Now, before we start our adventure with AC frontend development, there are a few things we have to learn about and focus on. Feel free to skip this chapter and the next one if you are familiar with environments, Docker containers, and so on.

In the best scenario, you are given everything on a silver platter and all you need to do is start the environment with a few simple instructions.

This is your first step and is where our AC theme development journey begins, so let’s start.

You’re probably wondering or thinking, “Why do I need to focus on/know these things about environment setup?” and you are absolutely right to ask these questions. If you have worked on enterprise-class projects in larger teams before, you might be used to a situation where a complete fully working environment is given to you with a set of instructions on how to set it up – a silver platter, if you will. I truly wish that all AC projects you will be working on in the future will be like that, but as we all know, the world is not that perfect. Knowing this will also make you a great asset to the team you will be working with.

What if you are a freelancer and someone asks you to take over AC project theme development and you’re all on your own? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to show some skills, win the contract, and be able to do everything by yourself? It’s the little things that matter the most.

So, heads up – our road (one of many) to set up the local environment starts now and it will be a bumpy one!! Our journey starts with setting up our forge, where we will travel through the command-line interface (CLI), Composer (not a musician) package installation, and AC commands.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Hardware and technical requirements
• Preparing the technology stack for AC
• Virtualization with Docker
• Preparing a Docker manager