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Last Reviewed: October 15, 2024

Create a new Composer-managed CMS site

Learn how to create new integrated composer Drupal and WordPress sites on Pantheon.

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Drupal with Integrated Composer

This section provides information on how to use Drupal with Integrated Composer.

Create Your Site

There are two ways you can spin up a site using WordPress Composer Managed:

  • Running the following terminus command:

    terminus site:create --org ORG --region REGION -- <site_name> <label> drupal-11-composer-managed

  • Using this site create link.

The site you create will be based on the Pantheon-maintained Drupal Composer Managed upstream. Once this install completes, visit the Dev environment and follow the prompts to complete the CMS installation.

Understand the Drupal Codebase

Composer installs required packages into configured paths for Drupal, such as:

  • Contributed themes are installed into web/themes/contrib/
  • Custom themes are installed into web/themes/custom/
  • Contributed modules are installed into web/modules/contrib/
  • Custom modules are installed into web/modules/custom/
  • Drupal core is installed into web/core/
  • Librariries are installed into web/libraries/

For more information about managing dependencies with Composer on Pantheon, see our documentation about dependencies or the Composer documentation.

WordPress with Integrated Composer and Bedrock

This section provides information on how to use Bedrock with Integrated Composer on a WordPress site.

WordPress does not natively support Composer, however, Bedrock is a WordPress-specific framework for using Composer on WordPress sites.

Requirements

Create Your Site

There are two ways you can spin up a site using WordPress Composer Managed:

  • Running the following terminus command:

    terminus site:create --org ORG --region REGION -- <site_name> <label> wordpress-composer-managed

  • Using this site create link.

The site you create will be based on the Pantheon-maintained WordPress Composer Managed upstream. Once this install completes, visit the Dev environment and follow the prompts to complete the CMS installation.

Review the sections below for important information about your site, including an explanation of the directory structure and essential configuration actions.

Use Roots Bedrock

Environment Variables

Bedrock makes use of an .env file to store environment variables. Pantheon takes care of many of these variables in .env.pantheon. You may set your own environment variables in a new .env or environment variables that are local-only in .env.local using the .env.example as a guide. Wrap values that may contain non-alphanumeric characters with quotes, or they may be incorrectly parsed.

WordPress Config

The wp-config.php file is located in the web directory. As with other WordPress sites on Pantheon, much of this is taken care of for you in wp-config-pantheon.php. Application-level configuration takes place in config/application.php while platform-specific updates are made in config/application.pantheon.php. This means that config/application.php can be modified for your WordPress configuration settings without fear of conflicts with the upstream. Any configuration changes should be made to your config/appliction.php not your wp-config.php file directly.

You can learn more about WordPress configuration with Bedrock in the Bedrock Configuration docs.

Understand the WordPress Codebase

Bedrock installs WordPress as a required package so updates can be managed by Composer. As such, the contents of the wp-content directory have been moved outside the WordPress codebase so changes can be made safely to files within those directories without conflicts. Learn more about Bedrock's folder structure here.

  • Themes are installed into web/app/themes/
  • Plugins are installed into web/app/plugins
  • Must-use plugins are installed into web/app/mu-plugins
  • WordPress core is installed into web/wp
  • The WordPress admin dashboard is available at https://example.com/wp/wp-admin/

For more information about managing dependencies with Composer on Pantheon, see our documentation about dependencies or the Composer documentation.

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