Getting Started / Requirements

Note: You are currently reading the documentation for Bolt 2.2. Looking for the documentation for Bolt 5.2 instead?

The system requirements for Bolt are modest, and it should run on any fairly modern webserver:

• PHP 5.3.3 or higher
• Access to SQLite (which comes bundled with PHP 5.3), or MySQL or PostgreSQL
• Apache with mod_rewrite enabled (.htaccess files) or Nginx (virtual host configuration covered below)

Note: Although PHP 5.3.3 is the absolutely minimum required version of Bolt, we strongly recommend a newer version, like PHP 5.5 or 5.6. These newer versions are not only safer, but your website will be significantly faster as well.

Note: While Bolt 2.X will work very well in PHP 7, the included version of the error reporting package whoops will in certain cases not. This will probably not affect your experience.

The PHP installation has a few additional requirements. On most servers these are default settings, and Bolt should work out-of-the-box.

• A minimum of 32MB of memory allocated to PHP
• The PDO extension, to connect to a database
• The cUrl extension
• The GD Extension

Note the following PHP modules are known to conflict with Bolt and must be disabled:

• Zend Guard Loader
• ionCube

Browser requirements¶

The Bolt backend was designed and built to work optimally in any modern browser.

Desktop browsers:

• Chrome 21 or later
• Firefox 15 or later
• Safari 6.0 or later
• Internet Explorer 9 or later. (IE 8 works somewhat. A bit)

Mobile browsers:

• Safari for iOS 6.0 or later
• Chrome for iOS
• Chrome for Android

Note: These requirements are completely separated for websites that are built with Bolt. The templates that Bolt uses, are developed the way you want them to be.