Pico CMS Installation and Setup

Installation and Setup of Pico CMS

Pico is installed via Composer or by downloading a ready archive. Requirements are minimal: PHP 7.0+ (recommended 8.0+), extensions mbstring and dom. Database is not needed.

Installation via Composer

composer create-project picocms/pico-composer /var/www/mysite
cd /var/www/mysite

Installation from Archive

curl -L https://github.com/picocms/Pico/releases/latest/download/pico-release-v3.0.0.zip -o pico.zip
unzip pico.zip -d /var/www/mysite

Nginx Configuration

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name mysite.com;
    root /var/www/mysite;
    index index.php;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    # Close service directories
    location ~ ^/(config|content|lib|vendor|\.git) {
        deny all;
        return 404;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

Apache (.htaccess)

Pico comes with ready .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^ index.php [QSA,L]

# Protect content directories
<FilesMatch "\.(md|yml|yaml|twig)$">
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

Configuration config/config.yml

site_title: My Site
base_url: ~                  # auto-detect; set explicitly if issues

theme: my-theme
twig_config:
  autoescape: false
  cache: false               # enable in production: 'cache/twig'
  debug: false

content_dir: content/
content_ext: .md

date_format: 'd.m.Y'
timezone: 'Europe/Minsk'
locale: ru_RU.UTF-8

rewrite_url: true            # Pretty URLs via mod_rewrite/Nginx

# Default meta
meta:
  - name: description
  - name: author
  - name: date
  - name: robots
  - name: template

# Page order
pages_order:
  by: alpha
  asc: true

# Plugins
PicoFeed:
  enabled: true
PicoSitemapPlugin:
  enabled: true

Installing Plugins

Plugins are located in plugins/. Manual installation:

# Sitemap generation plugin
cd /var/www/mysite/plugins
git clone https://github.com/picocms/pico-plugin-sitemap.git PicoSitemap

# Or via composer if plugin is published
composer require picocms/pico-plugin-sitemap

Pico automatically connects all plugins from plugins/ that have {PluginName}.php file.

Content Directory Structure

content/
  index.md              # homepage
  404.md                # error page
  _navigation.md        # _ at start = hidden (not in nav)
  about.md
  services/
    index.md
    web-dev.md
    mobile.md
  blog/
    index.md
    %year%/
      my-post.md        # /blog/2024/my-post

Pages are sorted by filename; for manual sorting add numeric prefix: 01.about.md, 02.services.md.

Twig Cache in Production

# config/config.yml
twig_config:
  cache: 'cache/twig'

# Clear cache when updating content/templates
rm -rf /var/www/mysite/cache/twig/*