Setup Guide

What you need installed, and what to do with the zip once you've downloaded it.

What you need before you start

Docker Desktop installed and running (Windows/Mac), or Docker Engine 20.10.0+ on native Linux
Docker updated to version 20.10 or newer — older versions will fail to start the project
Internet access to GitHub and Docker Hub, to download the project's four images the first time you run it
Local ports 8000–8999 and 9000–9999 free (the generator picks a pair automatically per project, but they still need to be unused)
About 2GB of free disk space, for the downloaded images and the site's database volume
Windows 10/11 with PowerShell 5.1+ to use the one-click start.bat launcher On macOS/Linux, Docker Compose is run manually instead - see Step 4 below.

Setting up a downloaded project

1 Download the project zip

On the main generator page, sign in with GitHub, enter a project name, and click Generate Project. Your browser downloads a file named <project-name>.zip.

2 Unzip it into its own folder

Extract the zip into an empty folder — for example C:\Users\you\Projects\project-name. This folder becomes your project's root; everything below runs from inside it.

Windows

3 Double-click start.bat

This single launcher handles everything else automatically:

Checks whether Docker Desktop is installed, and offers to install it (via winget) if it isn't
Confirms your Docker version is 20.10 or newer
Starts Docker Desktop if it isn't already running, and waits for its engine to come up
Downloads the four required images (mysql:5.7, wordpress:latest, wordpress:cli, phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin)
Starts the containers
Waits for WordPress, its plugins, and its theme to finish installing — a first run commonly takes 15–20 minutes, longer if you checked extra theme/plugin options, so this is normal (the launcher waits up to 30 minutes before giving up)
Opens the finished site in your default browser automatically

If something fails, the window stays open and tells you what to check, and the details are also saved to error.log in the project folder — check that file first if the window closes before you can read it.

macOS / Linux

4 Run Docker Compose manually

start.ps1/start.bat are Windows-only. From a terminal in the project folder, run the equivalent steps yourself:

docker compose pull — downloads the required images
docker compose up -d — starts the containers
Wait until a file named .wp-cli-ready appears in the project folder before opening the site
Open the site URL shown as WP_URL in the downloaded docker-compose.yaml