Setup Neos with Local Beach

Local Beach provides a tailor-made Docker-based setup for macOS and Linux.

#What is Local Beach?

Local Beach provides a tailor-made, free development environment for Neos and Flow, based on Docker and Docker Compose.

Does not work on Windows

Local Beach is not yet running on Windows without issues. While the Docker Compose setup in the background does work on Windows, the tooling still needs to be adjusted. If you want to help out by testing a development version, get in touch with us at Flownative!

#Step by Step Instructions

#1. Install Homebrew

Local Beach comes with a command line tool that has to be installed first. To install it, you need Homebrew installed. Follow the instructions on https://brew.sh/ to do so.

#2. Install Local Beach

Once you have Homebrew set up, install Beach CLI by running the following commands:

bash
brew tap flownative/flownative
brew install localbeach
beach version

The last command should have shown you a version number. If you saw an error message instead, double check the previous steps.

And feel free to read the getting started guide for Local Beach to learn more.

#3. Check out the project (or start from scratch)

Depending on whether you want to start a project from scratch, or you have an existing project you want to work on, chose a way to proceed:

Start from Scratch:

To create a new project, use the following commands, which will create the base directory structure and download all dependencies.

bash
composer create neos/neos-base-distribution neos-example

After a short while all packages should have been downloaded and installed.

Now, it's the right time to create a new Git repository for your project and add everything to it.

bash
cd neos-example
git init
git commit --allow-empty -m "TASK: Initialize empty repository"
git add .
git commit -m "TASK: Initial commit"
# optionally, also run "git remote add ..." and "git push"

Check out an existing project:

To check out an existing project, simply clone it and  to install all dependencies.

bash
git clone http://YOUR-PROJECT-URL-HERE your-project
cd your-project
composer install

#4. Set up Local Beach

This is something you only need to do once for you project. Run

bash
beach init

This creates the needed Local Beach configuration. Feel free to have a look at the created files.

After that step, make sure to version the important bits:

none
git add .localbeach.dist.env
git add .localbeach.docker-compose.yaml
git add --force Configuration/Development/Beach/Settings.yaml
git commit -m 'TASK: Add Local Beach configuration'

#5. Start Local Beach

To start your local setup, run:

bash
beach start

Now, you are ready to access the Neos instance in your browser with the URL shown on the command line:

none
INFO Starting project ...
DEBUG Creating project database (if needed) ...
INFO You are all set
INFO When files have been synced, you can access this instance at http://neos-example.localbeach.net

At this point this will most likely run into an error message of some sort. For a fresh project, run the setup tool as described next.

#6. Running the Setup Tool

The last step would be to install Neos itself. For this, you can take a look at the instructions for the setup tool.

To run the Flow commands shown in those instructions, enter the PHP contrainer first by running:

bash
beach exec

Now head over to the Neos setup guide, and follow it as needed.

Be aware that the database connection is already configured correctly in Local Beach at this point.

Following Guide: Running the Setup Tool

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