ProcessWire Installation and Setup

ProcessWire Installation and Setup

ProcessWire is installed manually — there's no package manager like apt or brew. Minimum requirements: PHP 7.4+ (8.1+ recommended), MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.3+, Apache/Nginx with .htaccess support or equivalent URL rewriting.

Installation Process

# Download latest release
curl -L https://github.com/processwire/processwire/archive/refs/heads/master.zip -o pw.zip
unzip pw.zip -d /var/www/mysite
cd /var/www/mysite

# Set permissions
chmod 755 site/assets/files site/assets/cache site/assets/logs site/assets/sessions

Web installer launches at http://yourdomain.com/install.php. It checks for PHP extensions (pdo_mysql, gd, mbstring, openssl), creates database tables, and generates /site/config.php.

After installation completes, install.php is deleted automatically — if not, delete manually.

config.php Configuration

Key parameters after installation:

// /site/config.php

$config->dbHost = 'localhost';
$config->dbName = 'mysite_db';
$config->dbUser = 'mysite_user';
$config->dbPass = 'secret';
$config->dbPort = '3306';

// Debug — only on dev environment
$config->debug = false;

// Site URL (important when behind reverse proxy)
$config->httpHosts = ['mysite.com', 'www.mysite.com'];

// File types
$config->fileContentTypes = array_merge(
    $config->fileContentTypes,
    ['svg' => 'image/svg+xml']
);

// Sessions
$config->sessionExpireSeconds = 86400;

Nginx Configuration

Apache config is generated automatically via .htaccess. For Nginx:

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

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?it=$uri&$args;
    }

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

    # Protect admin directories
    location ~ ^/site/(assets|modules|templates)/ {
        deny all;
    }
}

Initial Setup After Installation

Installation Profile. ProcessWire offers three profiles: blank (clean), default (demo content), languages (with language support). For production — blank or languages.

site/ Directory Structure:

site/
  assets/        # uploaded files, cache (not in git)
  modules/       # custom and third-party modules
  templates/     # PHP templates
  config.php
  config-dev.php # dev overrides (git-ignored)

config-dev.php lets you keep dev settings separate:

// config-dev.php — loaded automatically if exists
$config->debug = true;
$config->dbHost = '127.0.0.1';
$config->dbName = 'mysite_dev';

Module Installation

// Via admin: Modules → Install → search by name
// Or manually: copy module folder to /site/modules/
// then: Modules → Refresh → Install

Essential modules for most projects: MarkupPagerNav (pagination), InputfieldTinyMCE (WYSIWYG), LanguageSupport (if needed).