DDEV is a Docker-based tool that provisions the web server, PHP and database for a local development environment in isolated containers. It is a good choice when you don't want to install PHP and Composer on your operating system. This article creates a new October CMS project with DDEV and opens it in the browser in a few commands.

You will need a text editor to work with October CMS templates, blueprints, and configuration files. While any plain text editor will work, a modern code editor makes the experience much better with features like syntax highlighting, file browsing, and integrated terminal.

The following guide can be used to install October CMS v4 atop an existing Laravel 12 application. This is useful if you want to keep the same database without losing data or just prefer to use Laravel as a starting point.

Laragon is a portable, isolated local development environment for Windows. It includes PHP, Apache, MySQL and Composer, and its Auto Virtual Hosts feature gives every project in its www folder a pretty URL such as http://myoctober.test. This article installs October CMS from Laragon's terminal, using Laragon's MySQL server and an automatic virtual host.

Laravel Sail is a light-weight command-line interface for Laravel's default Docker development environment. Since October CMS is built on Laravel, Sail can be added to an October CMS project to run PHP and MySQL in Docker containers. This article creates a new project, adds Sail to it, and installs October CMS inside the containers.

In this series of posts we'll be exploring some options of running October across various environments.