Considerations

Components needed to get started with a Front-End Site.

Last Reviewed: August 11, 2022

Ensure your system has the correct components to deploy a Pantheon Front-End Site.

Components for Pantheon Front-End Sites

You have the decoupled offering enabled in your dashboard.
You are using Visual Studio Code (VS Code)
- Other IDEs can be used, but our project ships with suggested plugins and example settings for VSCode.

The following components are needed to configure your backend, especially if using the starter kits for Pantheon Front-End Sites:

Lando: An open source, cross-platform, local development environment and DevOps tool built on Docker container technology.
- Install the latest release of Lando. Lando ships with a recommended version of Docker Desktop if you do not already have it installed.
The following tools are included in the Lando VM, but can be useful to have installed for use without Lando:
- PHP - An open-source, server-side programming language that can be used to create websites, applications, and more. It is a widely-used language that can be embedded in HTML. Install using Homebrew on Mac to not conflict with the PHP version that comes with your operating system.
- Composer - Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare libraries for your project and manages them for you.
- Terminus - The command-line interface which provides advanced interaction with Pantheon. Terminus is needed to update build tools for a Front-End Site.

The following components are needed to configure your frontend for the decoupled offering:

To create and configure a new decoupled project using a Front-End Site starter kit, the following components are required:

Install Composer globally.
- Composer is required for the CMS backends.
Install Terminus version 3.0.0 or higher.
- You can also install the following plugins to improve your experience:
  - terminus self:plugin:install terminus-build-tools-plugin
  - terminus self:plugin:install terminus-secrets-plugin
  - Reload the terminus plugins: terminus self:plugin:reload
  - Clear cache for composer: composer clear-cache
  - Validate that the required plugins are installed: terminus self:plugin:list
Create a Machine Token
- Generate a machine token.
- Authenticate the token into Terminus.
Create GitHub Personal Access Tokens.
Create CircleCI Personal API Tokens.

Front-End Sites will not work with all products and feautures on our platform.

Pantheon Front-End Sites are not compatible with the following Pantheon products:

The following features are currently not supported with Pantheon Front-End Sites: