Getting Started / Requirements

Note: You are currently reading the documentation for Bolt 5.0. 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 7.2.9 or higher
• Access to SQLite (which comes bundled with PHP), or MySQL/MariaDB.
  • MySQL 5.7.8 or higher
  • MariaDB 10.2.3 or higher
  • SQLite 3.17 (with JSON1), 3.38 or higher

The PHP installation has a few additional requirements. On most servers these are installed by default, 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)
  • openssl
  • curl
  • gd
  • dom
  • intl (optional but recommended)
  • json
  • mbstring (optional but recommended)
  • opcache (optional but recommended)
  • posix
  • xml
  • simplexml
  • tokenizer
  • 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.

Webserver¶

During development you can run Bolt using PHP's built-in webserver, the Symfony client, Docker, XAMPP, MAMP, or pretty much whatever you're used to. To run a Bolt site in production, you'll need apache with mod_rewrite enabled (.htaccess files) or Nginx. See the chapter on webserver configuration for details.

Note: This documentation makes the assumption that you're setting up Bolt on a local development machine. Not on the server where you intend to run a production website. If you do not have a local development environment, we recommend taking the time to set this up.

Browser requirements¶

The Bolt backend was designed and built to work optimally in any modern browser, both on Desktop and Mobile. Internet Explorer is not supported. Use Firefox, Edge, Safari or Chrome.

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.