Home > PrestaShop 9 > Themes > Getting started > Set up your local environment

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Notice: You are browsing the documentation for PrestaShop 9, which is currently in development.

You might want to read the documentation for the current version, PrestaShop 8. Read the current version of this page

Setting up your local environment

Now that you intend to building a theme for PrestaShop, you are better off keeping all your development work on your machine. The main advantage is that it makes it possible for you to entirely bypass the process of uploading your files on your online server in order to test your changes. Another advantage is that a local test environment enables you to test code without the risk of breaking your production store. Having a local environment is the essential first step in the path of web development.

The following content assumes you’re a developer and you want to create a theme or a module.

Installing PrestaShop

We advise you to install PrestaShop using Git and Composer.

Open a command line on your (empty) working directory, then:

Clone PrestaShop

git clone https://github.com/PrestaShop/PrestaShop.git

Install dependencies
```
composer install
```

Using git you can choose your PrestaShop version:

git checkout 8.1.x

Also we would warn you to test your final result with a zip release, just for safety (since vendor version might be slightly different).

If you haven’t done it yet, we strongly recommend you to read our article Set Up Your Git For Contributing

Building your .gitignore file

A gitignore file is a must-have for any Git-versioned project, as it specifies intentionally untracked files that Git should ignore.

What to ignore

Generally, you shouldn’t version the following types of files:

Temporary files (such as cache files)
Generated files (such as minified CSS or retrieved XML files)
Files with credentials or personal information (such as settings.inc.php)
OS and IDE-related files (such as .DS_Store or .idea/)
assets/css/*
assets/js/*
node_modules/

We suggest that you build your own using https://gitignore.io.

If you are building a full project for a client, you can read our article on building a gitignore for PrestaShop.

Create your theme from the Classic Theme

When you want to create a theme, the best way is to use the Classic theme (included with PrestaShop) as a base.

Create a new folder under themes/, and copy the contents of classic in it.

Create your theme.yml file

First of all, you need to rename config/theme.dist.yml to config/theme.yml and edit it according to the name of your theme.

name: YOUR_THEME_DIRECTORY_NAME
display_name: YOUR THEME NAME
version: 1.0.0
author:
  name: "PrestaShop Team"
  email: "[email protected]"
  url: "https://www.prestashop-project.org"
 
meta:
  compatibility:
      from: 8.0
      to: ~