Quickstart

So you want to get Chassis running? Fantastic! We’ll be here to guide you through the process.

For now, we’re going to speed through some of these commands to get you started as quickly as possible. We’ve got a command reference waiting for you later.

Note

Psst, if you haven’t seen the notation before, lines starting with $ indicate commands you can type in, and other lines are output. Don’t include the $ when typing!

Prerequisites

Before using Chassis, this is how your system should be set up:

MacOS Intel chips

MacOS Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3) chips

Windows

  • Install VirtualBox

  • Install Vagrant

  • Make sure you have Zeroconf networking (Bonjour) set up:

If you have Bonjour Print Services or Creative Cloud installed, you already have Bonjour.

Otherwise, you need to install Bonjour on your system. The easiest way to do this is to install Bonjour Print Services. If you’d prefer not to do this, you can follow these instructions to install just Bonjour.

We also have some additional troubleshooting information.

Linux

  • Install VirtualBox

  • Install Vagrant

  • Make sure you have Zeroconf networking (Bonjour) set up:

  • You need to have Avahi installed on your system.

    For Ubuntu:

    $ sudo apt-get install avahi-dnsconfd

Installing

  1. Clone the Chassis repo:

    $ git clone --recursive https://github.com/Chassis/Chassis <myproject>

    If you forget --recursive then run:

    $ git submodule update --init

    Note

    Replace <myproject> with your preferred directory name.

  2. Install your WordPress project:

    • If you have an existing project:

      Clone the content/ directory!

      $ cd <myproject>
$ git clone git@github.com:yourcompany/yourproject.git content

    • If you are starting a new project:

      You will need to create a content folder:

      $ cd <myproject>
$ mkdir -p content/{themes,plugins}

  3. Boot up a Virtual Machine:

    $ vagrant up

    • Windows: Open a console with administrator privileges (Right-Click->Run as Administrator) and use this console to run vagrant up.

    Note

    New Vagrant and VirtualBox users may see this error: Stderr: VBoxManage: error: DHCP server already exists

    This error typically occurs when Vagrant and VirtualBox are both fresh installs, and you haven’t used the networking tools before. This can be fixed by upgrading to Vagrant 1.7.0 or newer. (For older versions, a workaround is available)

  1. Make a copy of local-config-sample.php and rename to local-config.php

  2. Browse to http://vagrant.local and you should see your site! The default login credentials are admin and password and the login URL is http://vagrant.local/wp/wp-admin.

What’s in the box?

By default we want to keep Chassis lean, below is a list of what we include:

Some tools including Git and cURL are installed during setup, but you shouldn’t rely on these being available. Many more are available as default Ubuntu utilities.

Note that some tools like phpMyAdmin and Memcache are available instead as extensions, which are installed separately to keep Chassis fast.

Rather than providing everything under the sun, we provide a set of sensible defaults, along with the ability to change this as needed. This helps keep Chassis fast by designing for the common use-case first. This flexibility comes from two core parts: configuration, and extensions.

Updating

If you ever want to update Chassis, here’s a quick two-step procedure:

# Pull and rebase (in case you have project-specific commits)
git pull --rebase

# Update submodules (Puppet modules)
git submodule update --init

# Update WP
git pull

Reinstall

During the development of plugins, it’s often necessary to fill the WordPress databases with a bunch of test content, often using the wp * generate commands. You will often want to reset your WordPress install back to a clean state and not want to do a full vagrant destroy -y && vagrant up to do so. We have made a script that you can run to do this for you.

To run the script, simply run the following command:

$ vagrant ssh
$ sh reinstall.sh
$ Drop all WordPress tables and reinstall? [y/N] y

This will drop all WordPress tables and reinstall WordPress.