How to install Romanesco?

Over the years, Romanesco spiraled out of control its original intentions a bit. It was meant to be a single package, bringing the PatternLab concept to MODX. But now Romanesco spans over 5 repositories and requires quite a few steps to get up and running.

But don't worry.

There is a command line installer available called Romanesco Seed, to help you through the installation process. Never send a man to do a robots job. But if for some strange reason you really feel like torturing yourself, or if you're just curious about the inner workings of the installer, then feel free to check out the manual steps as well.

Cooking a Romanesco

Paid software alert

If you want to publish your project to a live domain, you'll need a license for ContentBlocks and Redactor. These are commercial extras for MODX, developed and maintained by ModMore. A single ContentBlocks license is €79 and for Redactor, that's €25. The people at ModMore are very considerate: you can try their extras for free during development.

So: publishing your project will require you to purchase a license, but getting started with Romanesco on your local computer is still free. If you're OK with that, then let's move on!

Command line installation

The best way to install Romanesco is with Romanesco Seed. Seed is basically a bunch of Bash scripts that automates as much of the installation process as possible.

There are still a few steps you'll need to take though, to make it match your environment. If you're familiar with the command line, it should be fairly straightforward. If not, then try to follow the steps in the adjacent screencast as closely as possible on your machine.

Note that in the screencast, I'm entering a value for the packagesPath variable. This is only meant to speed up the installation process, so you don't have to watch 5 minutes of package downloads. For creating real projects I recommend leaving it empty.

Full installation guide

Manual installation

Although it's not recommended to install Romanesco manually, these resources should give you a bit more insight into how Romanesco works.

More notes

Backend installation

This covers the installation of MODX with Gitify, up to the initial build.

Frontend installation

Install SemanticUI, including a custom Romanesco theme.

Theming structure

Complete control over project styling thanks to 3 different theming layers.