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post_title menu_title tags
Setting up your development environment Development environment setup tutorial, setup

Introduction

This guide will walk you through the steps of setting up a basic development environment, which can be useful for store builders, contributors, and extending WooCommerce.

Creating a WooCommerce extension — a plugin which extends the functionality of WooCommerce — or developing a WooCommerce-compatible theme can be an excellent way to build custom functionality into your store and potentially monetize your development through the WooCommerce Marketplace.

If you would like to contribute to the WooCommerce core platform, please read our contributor documentation and guidelines.

If you want to sell your extensions or themes on the WooCommerce marketplace, please read more about becoming a Woo partner.

Prerequisites

WooCommerce adheres to WordPress code standards and guidelines, so it's best to familiarize yourself with WordPress Development as well as PHP. Currently WooCommerce requires PHP 7.4 or newer.

Knowledge and understanding of WooCommerce hooks and filters will allow you to add and change code without editing core files. You can learn more about WordPress hooks and filters in the WordPress Plugin Development Handbook.

Recommended reading

WooCommerce extensions are a specialized type of WordPress plugin. If you are new to WordPress plugin development, take a look at some of the articles in the WordPress Plugin Developer Handbook.

Required software

There are some specific software requirements you will need to consider when developing WooCommerce extensions. The necessary software includes:

Note: A POSIX compliant operating system (e.g., Linux, macOS) is assumed. If you're working on a Windows machine, the recommended approach is to use WSL (available since Windows 10).

Setting up a reusable WordPress development environment

In addition to the software listed above, you'll also want to have some way of setting up a local development server stack. There are a number of different tools available for this, each with a certain set of functionality and limitations. We recommend choosing from the options below that fit your preferred workflow best.

WordPress-specific tools

Below are a couple of tools designed specifically for a WordPress environment:

  • vvv is a highly configurable, cross-platform, and robust environment management tool powered by VirtualBox and Vagrant. This is one tool that the WooCommerce Core team recommends to contributors.
  • wp-env is a command-line utility maintained by the WordPress community that allows you to set up and run custom WordPress environments with Docker and JSON manifests.

General PHP-based web stack tools

Below is a collection of tools to help you manage your environment that are not WordPress-specific.

  • MAMP - A local server environment that can be installed on Mac or Windows.
  • WAMP - A Windows web development environment that lets you create applications with Apache2, PHP, and MySQL.
  • XAMPP - An easy-to-install Apache distribution containing MariaDB, PHP, and Perl. It's available for Windows, Linux, and OS X.

Minimum server requirements

Regardless of the tool you choose for managing your development environment, you should make sure it meets the server recommendations for WooCommerce as well as the requirements for running WordPress.

Anatomy of a WordPress development environment

While development environments can vary, the basic file structure for a WordPress environment should be consistent.

When developing a WooCommerce extension, you'll usually be doing most of your work within the public_html/ directory of your local server. Take some time to familiarize yourself with a few key paths:

  • wp-content/debug.log is the file where WordPress writes the important output such as errors and other messages that can be useful for debugging.
  • wp-content/plugins/ is the directory on the server where WordPress plugin folders live.
  • wp-content/themes/ is the directory on the server where WordPress theme folders live.

Add WooCommerce Core to your environment

When developing an extension for WooCommerce, it's helpful to install a development version of WooCommerce Core.

You can install WooCommerce Core on your development environment by:

  1. Cloning the WooCommerce Core repository.
  2. Installing and activating the required Node version.
  3. Installing WooCommerce’s dependencies.
  4. Building WooCommerce.

Clone the WooCommerce Core repository

You can clone the WooCommerce Core repository into wp-content/plugins/ using the following CLI command:

cd /your/server/wp-content/plugins
git clone https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce.git
cd woocommerce

Install and activate Node

It is recommended to install and activate Node using Node Version Manager (or nvm). You can install nvm using the following CLI command:

nvm install

You can learn more about how to install and utilize nvm in the nvm GitHub repository.

Install dependencies

To install WooCommerce dependencies, use the following CLI command:

pnpm install
composer install

Build WooCommerce

Use the following CLI command to compile the JavaScript and CSS that WooCommerce needs to operate:

pnpm build

Note: If you try to run WooCommerce on your server without generating the compiled assets, you may experience errors and other unwanted side-effects.

Alternatively, you can generate a woocommerce.zip file with the following command:

pnpm build:zip

A woocommerce.zip file may be helpful if you’d like to upload a modified version of WooCommerce to a separate test environment.