mlocati/concretecms-skeleton

The bare minimum structure for a ConcreteCMS installation with Composer

dev-main 2026-06-18 05:45 UTC

Requires

• composer/installers: ^2.3
• concrete5/core: ^9.5
• vlucas/phpdotenv: ^5.6

MIT

• Michele Locati

README

Minimal ConcreteCMS Composer Project

This is the minimal project structure you need to have a Composer-based ConcreteCMS project.

How to use it?

With a GitHub Repository

If you plan to create a repository on GitHub with this project structure, simply use this skeleton. After you created your repository, you can remove (or adjust) the directory /.github and the files /LICENSE.txt and /README.md.

Without a GitHub Repository

Simply download this .zip file and extract it.

Configuration

ConcreteCMS Version

The ConcreteCMS version that will be installed is controlled by the concrete5/core defined in the require section of the composer.jsonfile:

{
    "require": {
        "concrete5/core": "^9"
    }
}

That ^9 means install the most recent version 9, but not version 10 or later.
You can of course adjust it. For example, if you want to install the exact version 9.4.8, simply write "concrete5/core": "9.4.8".

PHP Version

While developing a Concrete site, you may be using a PHP version on your PC that differs from the production one.

This may cause problems: for example you could add a composer dependency that's fine for your development environment, but breaks the production environment.

In order to avoid such problems, we can instruct composer to assume a specific PHP version.

That's done in the composer.json file with the following lines:

{
    "config": {
        "platform" : {
            "php" : "7.3"
        }
    }
}

You may want to adjust the PHP version so that it reflects the one you use in production.

Development Environment

You can create a .env file in the root directory of your project with this line:

CCM_ENVIRONMENT=development

By doing that, your Concrete installation will load development-specific options, for example:

• session cookies will work with HTTP requests too (not only with HTTPS)
• errors and warnings will always be displayed with full debug information

Usage

Once you configured the above settings, you can simply download ConcreteCMS and all its dependencies by running

composer update

You then will want to configure your webserver to create a website that points to the web directory, and install Concrete in the usual way.