Table of Contents

Clone the project

Summary

How to get a local copy of Dotkernel Light onto your machine, either with the recommended one-step Composer command or by cloning the repository directly.

If you are using Windows as OS on your machine, you can use WSL2 as development environment.

Currently we provide a distro implementation for AlmaLinux 10.

Installing Dotkernel Light

The recommended way to install Dotkernel Light is a single Composer command, which creates the directory, installs dependencies, and enables development mode in one step:

composer create-project dotkernel/light dk
cd dk

Cloning the repository directly

If you are instead cloning the repository directly — for example to contribute to Dotkernel Light itself — navigate inside the directory you want to download the project files into.

Make sure that

  • The directory is empty before proceeding to the download process.
    • You will get this error if the directory is not empty fatal: destination path '.' already exists and is not an empty directory. and no files will be cloned.
  • That you have writing permissions on the directory.

Once there, run the following command:

git clone https://github.com/dotkernel/light.git .

If everything ran correctly, you can expect to see an output like this, though the numbers may differ.

Cloning into '.'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 500, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (500/500), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (435/435), done.
remote: Total 500 (delta 51), reused 448 (delta 27), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (500/500), 399.14 KiB | 3.91 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (51/51), done.

Continue with Composer Installation, which requires the extra manual composer development-enable step that composer create-project performs for you automatically.

You can already open the project in your preferred IDE to double-check the files were copied correctly.

FAQ

Q: What is the fastest way to install Dotkernel Light? A: composer create-project dotkernel/light dk — it creates the directory, installs dependencies, and enables development mode in one step.

Q: Do I need an empty directory for composer create-project? A: No — only the manual git clone path requires an empty, writable directory.

Q: If I clone the repository directly, what extra step do I need that composer create-project skips? A: Running composer development-enable yourself, since only composer create-project runs it automatically.

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