Local development

Magento Commerce Cloud environments are Read Only, including all Starter environments and all Pro Integration, Staging, and Production environments. In a local development environment, you can write and test code prior to pushing it to an Integration environment for further testing and deployment to Staging and Production. You must develop in a local workspace using a cloned Integration environment and push changes to the remote, read-only Magento Commerce Cloud Git repository. You can choose one of two methods:

• Gather credentials {#credentials}
• Launch a Docker environment {#docker}
• Create a local environment {#local}

Gather credentials

Prior to setting up a workspace, gather the following credentials and accounts:

• Magento Access Key
  Provides secure access through a 32-character authentication token. The token authenticates between your account, the Magento 2 Composer repository (repo.magento.com), and any other Git services—such as GitHub—required for development. You can create multiple Magento access keys. For the workspace setup, you can start with one specific key for your code repository. Contact the Project Owner to generate Magento authentication keys.
• Cloud Project account
  The Project Owner or Technical Admin (Super User) should invite you to the Magento Commerce Cloud project. When you receive the e-mail invitation, click the link and follow the prompts to create your account. See Set up an account for details.
• Magento Encryption Key
  When importing an existing Magento system only, capture the Magento encryption key used to protect your access and data for the Magento database. For details on this key, see Resolve issues with encryption key

Launch a Docker environment

You can use the Docker environment to emulate the Magento Commerce Cloud Integration environment for local development. You need three, essential components: a Magento Commerce v2 template, Docker Compose, and Magento Commerce Cloud ece-tools package.

• Docker architecture and common commands
• Launch Docker development environment

Create a local environment

You can manually add a virtual machine (VM) and install Magento Commerce. The environment closely matches the cloud environments. The following steps walk-through manually preparing your local environment, installing Magento, and starting development:

1. Prepare for local environment setup
2. Install Magento prerequisites
3. Enable SSH keys
4. Set up the Magento file system owner (optional)
5. Clone and branch the project
6. Install Magento
7. First time deployment

You can import existing Magento custom code. See First steps for importing Magento Commerce.