Getting Started

Are you ready for a quick start with Sulu? Sit back, fasten your seat belts and… go!

Bootstrap a Project

We’ll bootstrap a new project based on the Sulu Skeleton with Composer:

composer create-project sulu/skeleton my-project -n

This command will bootstrap a new project in the directory my-project.

Tip

Now is a good time to start versioning your project. If you use Git, initialize a new Git repository and submit your first commit:

cd my-project
git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"

Note

If you want to use other languages than english or german for the administration interface of Sulu you need to configure them in the config/packages/sulu_admin.yaml file:

sulu_core:
    locales:
        en: English
        de: Deutsch
    translations:
        - en
        - de

Available languages are shown on Crowdin. Afterwards the languages have to be downloaded by running the following command:

bin/console sulu:admin:download-language

Webspaces

The content management part of Sulu is built upon webspaces. Each of these webspaces configure a content tree. Each content tree may contain translations for different locales.

The default webspace configuration is located in config/webspaces/example.xml. Rename this file so that it matches the name of your project.

To get started, change the <name> and the <key> of the webspace to the name of your project. The name is a human-readable label that is shown in the administration interface. The key is the unique identifier of the webspace:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<webspace xmlns="http://schemas.sulu.io/webspace/webspace"
          xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
          xsi:schemaLocation="http://schemas.sulu.io/webspace/webspace http://schemas.sulu.io/webspace/webspace-1.1.xsd">

    <name>My Project</name>
    <key>my-project</key>

    <!-- ... -->
</webspace>

Caution

Changing the <key> of a webspace later on causes complications. We recommend to decide what key to use before you build the database in the next step.

We’ll return to webspaces later in this book.

Setup the Database

Next we’ll setup a database for Sulu. You can use Sulu with the database backends supported by Doctrine DBAL. Some of those are currently still untested:

Platform	Supported
MySQL	yes
PostgreSQL	yes
Oracle	untested
Microsoft SQL Server	untested
SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere	untested
SQLite	no

The database connection information is stored as an environment variable called DATABASE_URL. For development, you can find and customize this inside .env.local: Here is an example for using Sulu with MySQL:

DATABASE_URL=mysql://db_user:db_password@127.0.0.1:3306/db_name

When you’re done with the configuration, populate the database with Sulu’s default data:

bin/adminconsole sulu:build dev

Caution

This command adds a user “admin” with password “admin” to your installation! If you don’t want to add that user, pass the argument prod instead:

bin/adminconsole sulu:build prod

Optionally, you can store the content of your website (all tables starting with phpcr_) in Apache Jackrabbit. We’ll get back to that later.

Start a Web Server

Now that the database is ready, we’ll fire up a server to try Sulu in the browser.

Sulu is made up of two separate applications for the administration interface and the website. Each application is optimized for its purpose. The applications can be managed with the command line tools bin/adminconsole (for the administration) and bin/websiteconsole (for the website).

However, we will run one server for both applications, and our front controller will make sure the correct application is loaded.

bin/console server:start

You can access the administration interface via http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin. The default user and password is “admin”.

The web frontend can be found under http://127.0.0.1:8000.

Tip

If you want to learn more about using Sulu with a real web server, read Server Configuration.

Next Steps

Your Sulu website is ready now! Check out the administration, create pages and play around.

When you’re ready to learn more, continue with Creating a Page Template.