Introduction

Platform.sh is a cloud platform for responsibly building, running, and scaling fleets of websites and applications. It enables you to run your web apps in the cloud with productive and consistent development and testing workflows.

You spend your time creating amazing experiences, not managing infrastructure.

Get started with Platform.sh by following this guide.

Why

The process of testing, deploying, and monitoring web applications (often grouped together under the term DevOps) can be complicated. You want to scale your offerings while maintaining consistency and reliability across your applications.

Platform.sh simplifies your development workflows and helps you automate manual tasks across a fleet of websites. You can create build images you can test and then deploy with confidence, knowing the changes work the same in production as they have in your development process.

See a more detailed overview of Platform.sh and how it can fit within your workflow in this video:

What you need

You need a few things before you can start creating projects.

An account

To get started, you need a Platform.sh account. You can start with a free 30-day trial that should contain everything you need to complete this guide.

If you don’t have an account yet, register for an account. You can use an email address or a GitHub, Google, Bitbucket, or GitLab account.

Git

GitOps is a term for workflows that use the Git version control software to manage infrastructure. It enables you to use familiar developer tools to manage Continuous Deployment in the cloud.

Use the same version control system for your infrastructure as for your app development. You get a history of changes with an audit log.

Git is at the center of work with Platform.sh. That’s why each step in this guide is connected to a common Git command.

Make sure your computer has Git installed.

CLI

To facilitate working with Platform.sh, you can use the Platform.sh command-line interface (CLI). This lets you carry out various actions from a terminal.

To install the CLI, use a Bash installation script. You can also install with Homebrew (on Linux, macOS, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux) or Scoop (on Windows).

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/platformsh/cli/main/installer.sh | bash

brew install platformsh/tap/platformsh-cli

scoop bucket add platformsh https://github.com/platformsh/homebrew-tap.git
scoop install platform

If you have issues with installation on a Mac, such as missing libraries, see how to troubleshoot CLI installation on M1 Macs.

Code

To start a project, you should have code on your computer that you’d like to deploy. It can be a basic “Hello World” site, such as you can find in the Platform.sh demos. Just something that you know runs.

An alternative is one of the Platform.sh templates. These are example apps that come with everything needed to run on Platform.sh.

Choose your stack

To get started with a project, choose the language or framework your code uses: