Setup Orchard Core Development Environment

    development  

asp net corecmsdot net coreorchard core

If you’ve been following along, I am certain you have started to understand my slight frustration with WordPress. I am not sure I am going to fully abandon the application because there is a need for it. But, at the heart of my development skills, I am a .NET developer and I learned my web development on ASP.NET and C#. Which brings me to the purpose of this post.

I am looking for a CMS that meets a few requirements. First, it should be easily extendable. Second, it should be fast and last it should be modern. Alas, I am going to start working with Orchard Core which is currently in alpha beta, meaning, it is not ready for production. The Orchard CMS meets my criteria because its sole purpose is to be extendable which satisfies my first requirement. The latter two points are satisfied using Orchard Core which is the 2nd version. Orchard Core was rebuilt using ASP.NET Core which is the next iteration of ASP.NET and it is faster and modern. You can review the links for details on how it achieves these requirements. In this post, I am going to walk through how to setup Orchard Core for development.

What You Will Need:

  1. Text Editor: Visual Studio Code or IDE: Visual Studio Community (These are FREE!)
  2. .Net Core SDK and Runtime
  3. Git
  4. Node.js
  5. Orchard Core Source Code

Prep

Organize your development folder. I use a folder titled, dev, on an external HD. From here I store all my cloned git repositories in a folder titled repo.

organize dev folder

Getting the Source Code

Fire up your favorite command line application. I just use PowerShell because. To open your native command line shell in windows, press windows key + x + a

open command line

Navigate (cd) to your dev folder

cd into dev folder

Grab the repo link

copy git clone link

Git clone the repo link

clone the repository

Navigate into the Orchard Core directory

TIP: when you are typing you can partially type Orchard and tab to list the folder

tab shortcut when partially typing

Building the Source Code

Call dotnet restore

dotnet restore

Call dotnet build

dotnet build

Launching the Site

Navigate to \src\OrchardCore.Cms.Web\

cd into OrchardCore.Cms.Web

Call dotnet run

call dotnet run

When it’s ready to go you will see this notification

dotnet run command line response

And voila! You have Orchard Core up and running.

Conclusion

That development environment is incredibly easy to setup. It took me less than half an hour and I didn’t fumble with anything. I imagine some are saying, yeah but it is .NET and easy on Windows. All I have to say to you now is, the modern .NET is cross-platform and doesn’t play favorites when it comes to operating systems. So, Macintosh, any Linux flavor and Windows are all easy to get started on. Learn more here and if you really want to learn the new Orchard Core CMS check out this video. After watching the video, I realized how great Orchard Core is compared to WordPress and will be doing all of my development on that platform going forward.