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m2devbox – Boost your extension development

So you’ve got an idea for an amazing new Magento 2 module and want to start coding right away. But before you can start you have to set up a Magento installation. And when you’re done, you probably want to test your module in other Magento installations with different versions.

m2devbox can help you with two things:

  • automate the creation of Magento 2 installations
  • automate the creation of a blank Magento 2 module along with a running installation

Get m2devbox

Make sure you have installed the requirements on your machine:

  • Docker 17.05 or later
  • PHP 7.4 or later
  • php-zlib extension

Download the latest release of m2devbox from Github, make the PHAR file executable and optionally move it to a directory in your PATH, so that you can run it from everywhere:

wget https://github.com/MageGyver/m2devbox/releases/latest/download/m2devbox.phar
chmod u+x m2devbox.phar
mv m2devbox.phar /usr/local/bin/m2devbox
m2devbox status
Code language: Bash (bash)

Automate the creation of Magento installations

With m2devbox you can easily start and stop multiple versions of Magento. Under the hood it uses pre-configured Docker containers:

m2devbox start 2.4.2-p1
Code language: Bash (bash)

This command will start suitable Docker containers (for Apache, MariaDB and ElasticSearch), download and install Magento 2.4.2-p1.
On top of that, a directory called app_code/ will be created in your current directory and it will be mounted into /var/www/html/app/code/ so you can place your modules in it.

Currently m2devbox support all Magento 2 versions released 2020 and later – that means Magento 2.3.4 and above.

Automate the module creation

Additionally, m2devbox can assist you with creating a new blank module and starting a Magento 2 environment with it.
As a cherry on the cake it can generate PHPStorm project files with a full Magento 2 Plugin configuration. This way, PHPStorm coding assistances and indexes work with your Magento 2 environment.

The following command will create a PHPStorm project in the current working directory, add a src/ directory containing a blank module named MageGyver_DemoShipping and configure a Magento 2.4.2-p1 environment with it:

m2devbox start-module --vendor=MageGyver --module=DemoShipping --mage-version=2.4.2-p1 --phpstorm
Code language: Bash (bash)

Now you can start PHPStorm and open the newly created project directory. PHPStorm will start indexing the Magento source code. You can find your blank module under app/code/MageGyver/DemoShipping and start coding! 🚀

Get involved

Do you have suggestions or found a bug? Please feel free to open an issue at GitHub or share your thoughts in the comments below!

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