Getting Started / Requirements

Note: You are currently reading the documentation for Bolt 3.7. Looking for the documentation for Bolt 5.2 instead?

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

• PHP 7.1.2 or higher
• Access to SQLite (which comes bundled with PHP), or MySQL or PostgreSQL
• Apache with mod_rewrite enabled (.htaccess files) or Nginx (virtual host configuration covered below)

Note: If you're still using PHP 5.5.9 or higher, but lower than PHP 7.1.2, you can use Bolt 3.6 instead. It's configured to run on these older versions.
Ideally, update your PHP version instead.

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 following common PHP extensions:
  • pdo
  • mysqlnd (to use MySQL as a database)
  • pgsql (to use PostgreSQL as a database)
  • openssl
  • curl
  • gd
  • intl (optional but recommended)
  • json
  • mbstring (optional but recommended)
  • opcache (optional but recommended)
  • posix
  • xml
  • fileinfo
  • exif
  • zip

Note: The following PHP modules are known to conflict with Bolt and it's underlying Symfony components, and must be disabled:

• Zend Guard Loader
• ionCube

Note: A Bolt server must be accessible by a host name, or fully qualified domain name (FQDN), otherwise authentication will not work. Using `localhost` as the host name should also work. For developing sites, it is often useful to add a custom host name for the development server to your local computer's hosts file.

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 10 or later. (IE 9 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.