m2devbox

The goal of m2devbox is to accelerate setting up development environments for Magento 2.

If you are developing a Magento 2 module and want to quickly test it in multiple release versions of Magento, you can simply start your preferred Magento release, and your module(s) will be automatically available inside it!

m2devbox is not intended to create a production Magento 2 Docker setup.

📝 Requirements

• Docker 17.05+
• PHP ^7.4||^8.0
• php-zlib

m2devbox can make use of the newer BuildKit Docker backend that results in a faster build process with smaller Docker images. m2devbox automatically uses BuildKit if it finds a Docker Engine 18.09 or above.

🛠️ Installation

m2devbox is available as a PHAR file or as a Composer package. You can use it locally in your project, or you can install it globally.

Recommended: global PHAR installation

Download the latest PHAR release to your local machine, and move it to some directory that is accessible via $PATH. For moving, you might need superuser privileges:

Now you can run m2devbox anywhere.

Local PHAR installation

Download the latest PHAR release to your current working directory and use it right away.

Local Composer installation

Require magegyver/m2devbox in your local project and run it from the vendor/bin/ directory.

🧰 Workflows

With m2devbox, you can quickly spin up a Magento 2 instance and start developing and testing Magento 2 extensions inside it.

There are two main use cases in m2devbox:

Creating a new blank module and start a suitable Magento 2 instance.

This is the primary use case of m2devbox, and it is most useful if you want to start building a new module and need a working Magento 2 environment.

m2devbox will create a blank Magento 2 module in your working directory. Then it creates a vanilla Magento installation in your host system's cache directory (i.e. ~/.cache/m2devbox), builds a Docker setup containing this installation and mounts your new module into app/code/.

Starting a plain Magento 2 instance.

If you already have one or more modules and want to test them in any given Magento 2 instance, this mode is right for you.

m2devbox creates a vanilla installation of Magento 2 in your host system's cache directory (i.e. ~/.cache/m2devbox), builds a Docker setup containing this installation and mounts ./app_code/ into the container's Magento app/code/ directory.

💻 Usage

Create a new blank module and start a suitable Magento 2 instance

1. Create an empty working directory and execute m2devbox start-module inside it
2. Answer a few basic questions regarding your module (i.e. name and desired Magento 2 version).
3. Wait a moment while m2devbox creates a blank module and starts your Magento 2 instance. ☕
4. Add 127.0.0.1 m2.docker to your /etc/hosts file, to be able to access your site.
5. Navigate to http://m2.docker:8080 and see your modules in action!

Only start a Magento 2 instance

1. Navigate to a project directory somewhere on your machine.
2. Create an app_code/ directory. This directory will be mounted into the app/code/ directory of your Magento 2 instance and holds all your module source code.
3. (optional) Create a .env file in the root of your project directory to customize m2devbox settings for your project (see below).
4. Start an instance with your desired Magento 2 version: m2devbox start 2.4.2
5. Add 127.0.0.1 m2.docker to your /etc/hosts file, to be able to access your site.
6. Navigate to http://m2.docker:8080 and see your modules in action!

🔨 Custom .env settings

You can customize some aspects of m2devbox by defining variables in a .env file. Create a plain-text file called .env in your project folder and put each variable you want to use in a new line. Assign a value to each variable, separating the variable and value with an = (without spaces).

🎓 CLI Command reference

Check currently running instances

Running m2devbox without arguments or with the status argument displays an overview of what instances are built and currently running.

Create a blank module

This command creates a blank Magento 2 module inside the specified project directory, consisting of only the basic registration.php and etc/module.xml files.
Depending on your given options, m2devbox will create a PhpStorm project folder (.idea/) pre-configured with settings for the official Magento 2 PhpStorm Plugin.

You can either supply these options via command line arguments, or interactively answer questions when running the command without arguments.

Start the current project's default instance

To start the instance of Magento 2 that is configured in the current working directory's .env file, simply run m2devbox start without an explicit version string.

Start a specific Magento version

To start an specific instance of Magento 2 simply provide the desired release version as an argument for m2devbox start.

If there does not exist an instance for this version yet, m2devbox automatically starts downloading and installing it for you. You can grab a cup of coffee or simply look at the progress indicator while m2devbox sets up everything for you.

If an instance of this version is already started, it will be stopped and restarted again.

Stop the currently running instance

This command stops the currently running Magento 2 instance (only one instance can be running at the same time).

Clear an instance

This command stops the given instance(s) and deletes the associated Magento 2 source files and database.

Running CLI commands inside an instance

This command runs CLI commands inside a started container. If you run m2devbox cli without any arguments, a new bash session inside the web container will be started for you. This is mostly useful if you want to run different Magento CLI commands like bin/magento cache:clean.

👍 Supported Magento versions

• 2.3.4, -p2
• 2.3.5, -p1, -p2
• 2.3.6, -p1
• 2.3.7, -p3
• 2.4.0, -p1
• 2.4.1, -p1
• 2.4.2, -p1, -p2
• 2.4.3, -p1, -p2
• 2.4.4

⚖️ License

m2devbox is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0.