Manual installation
Make sure you’ve satisfied all prerequisites before continuing.
We recommend using the CLI to create a new Catalyst project. The CLI will guide you through the process of creating a new project and setting up your development environment. If you prefer to create a project manually, you can follow the manual installation instructions below. If you need to create a Catalyst channel using the REST Management API instead of the control panel, see the Manually create a Catalyst channel guide.
CLI
Manual
Set up a GitHub fork
You can click here to create a fork or, navigate to https://github.com/bigcommerce/catalyst and click “Fork” at the top of the page.
GitHub will prompt you to choose a name for your fork; for the purposes of this guide, we’ll refer to name of the fork as <YOUR_FORK_NAME>. You should replace <YOUR_FORK_NAME> in all of the commands below with your actual fork name.
Back in your terminal, add your fork as a remote to your local repository:
Run the development server
Finally, you can run the following command from the monorepo root to run the development server:
The following table lists localhost URLs with the default ports. When a port is unavailable, Catalyst uses the next available port. For example, if 3000 is in use, core will run on 3001.
Project structure
The structure of the Catalyst repository you just created is a monorepo with multiple codebases, including but not limited to the following:
It’s important to note that we use several tools throughout the Catalyst monorepo, such as Turborepo and pnpm Workspaces; you’ll notice references to these tools as you spend more time in the repository, but most developers likely won’t need to change any files, code, or configuration related to these tools in their normal Catalyst workflows.
