Directory Structure

A fresh Craft installation will have the following folders and files in it. Existing projects may have additional files in the root.

You don’t need to be familiar with everything in the working directory to get started with Craft, but it is a great way to discover tools and configuration that will help you work more efficiently, down the line.

# Customizing Paths

Craft’s default directory structure is intended to work for most projects and hosting environments, but it is deeply customizable. Paths to many of the core files and folders can be changed by setting special environment overrides.

Many of these directories’ locations are defined relative to Craft’s base path. Manually setting the CRAFT_BASE_PATH environment override without making the corresponding adjustments to the rest of your project’s structure (or explicitly setting other paths) can lead to a non-functional installation.

# Folders

# config/

Purpose
Holds all of your project’s static configuration files, as well as its license.key file. Your .env file, however, is typically located in the project root!
Configuration
CRAFT_CONFIG_PATH

# storage/

Purpose

This is where Craft stores a variety of files that are dynamically generated at runtime.

Some of the folders you might find in the storage directory include:

  • backups/ — Stores database backups that get created when you update Craft, or capture a backup via the control panel utility or CLI.
  • logs/ — Stores Craft’s logs and PHP error logs.
  • rebrand/ — Stores the custom Login Page Logo and Site Icon files, if you’ve uploaded them. Pro
  • runtime/ — Pretty much everything in here is there for caching and logging purposes. Nothing that Craft couldn’t live without, if the folder happened to get deleted.

For the curious, here are the types of things you will find in storage/runtime/ (though this is not a comprehensive list):

  • assets/ — Stores temporary uploads, image thumbnails, resized file icons, image editor scratch files, and copies of images stored on remote asset volumes (to save Craft an HTTP request when it needs the images to generate new thumbnails or transforms).
  • cache/ — Stores arbitrary data caches, when using the FileCache driver.
  • compiled_classes/ — Stores some dynamically-defined PHP classes.
  • compiled_templates/ — Stores compiled Twig templates. This is not your main templates folder!
  • temp/ — Other temporary files. The names and contents of files in here do not obey any convention—the assumption should be that they will be deleted or overwritten between requests.
Configuration

CRAFT_STORAGE_PATH — This is useful when running on systems with an ephemeral or “read-only” filesystem (wherein the only place to write temporary files is a central /tmp directory).

# templates/

Purpose
Your front-end Twig templates go in here. Any local site assets, such as images, CSS, and JS that should be statically served, should live in the web/ folder. The Routing page has an overview of how files in this folder are handled.
Configuration
CRAFT_TEMPLATES_PATH — Plugins may register additional template roots that behave similarly, but are not affected by this setting and generally do not contain user-editable templates.

# vendor/

Purpose
This is where all of your Composer dependencies go—including Craft and any plugins you’ve installed. This directory should not be tracked in version control. Instead, commit composer.lock, and use composer install (opens new window) to rebuild it.
Configuration
CRAFT_VENDOR_PATH — If you choose to relocate your vendor/ directory, make sure you update your .gitignore file to continue excluding it from version control.

# web/

Purpose

This directory represents your server’s web root. The public index.php file lives here, alongside your static images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files.

You can generate a URL to a file in this folder with Twig’s siteUrl() function.

Customization

CRAFT_WEB_ROOT — This is primarily used to set the @webroot alias.

# Files

# .env

Purpose

This is your PHP dotenv (opens new window) .env configuration file. It defines sensitive or environment-specific config values that don’t make sense to commit to version control.

The starter project (opens new window) provides a few examples of configuration that is apt to change between environments—you’ll see a group of similarly-named files, like .env.example.staging.

These are .env file templates. Maintain one of them (with sensitive data removed) as a starting point for your actual .env file, so collaborators know what variables the project requires. When they set up the project, they can run cp .env.example .env to duplicate the file and fill out missing keys!

Configuration

CRAFT_DOTENV_PATH — This setting was technically available in prior versions, but unreliable.

# .gitignore

This file tells Git which files it should exclude when committing changes. At minimum, it should contain entries for .env and Composer’s vendor/ directory.

Check out our Hosting & Deployment article for a list of other things you’ll want to exclude.

# bootstrap.php

The starter project (opens new window) consolidates important bootstrapping logic (like defining path constants that determine the above directories’ locations, and loading environment variables from a .env file) into this file. Both the HTTP and console entry scripts (web/index.php and craft, respectively) include this file—but each goes on to instantiate a different type of application (opens new window) suited for that request context.

This file’s location only matters to your entry scripts, so it is not “configurable” like other paths are. If you make changes to the layout of your project directory, be sure and update the references to bootstrap.php in index.php and the CLI entry point.

# composer.json

Your project’s PHP dependencies are declared in this file. If you just started your project, the only two packages it will explicitly require are craftcms/cms (Craft’s core) and vlucas/phpdotenv (used in the entry scripts). Existing projects may contain more packages—say, if the it relies on Craft plugins or includes other custom functionality.

Craft uses Composer to update itself and install plugins. See the Composer documentation (opens new window) for details on how this file works.

# composer.lock

This is a Composer-managed file that contains the exact list of packages (and their versions) that should be installed in the vendor/ directory. It should be committed to version control so that anyone working on the project can run composer install to download all its dependencies.

# craft

This is a command line executable used to run Craft’s console commands. Its structure is similar to web/index.php (insofar as it is responsible for bootstrapping Craft), but instead of a craft\web\Application (opens new window), it creates a craft\console\Application (opens new window) and handles the “request” with a different set of controllers.

# Other Common Files

Depending on the age and structure of your Craft project (as well as the tools used to build it), your project directory may look a little bit different! Here are some examples of common things you might find when inheriting a project:

# .ddev/

If you (or another maintainer) followed the installation instructions or Getting Started Tutorial, DDEV will have left a .ddev/ directory in the root of your project. This is safe to keep in version control—DDEV may make changes to it from time to time, but a separate .gitignore file exists within it to ensure only necessary files are tracked.

# migrations/

Projects that use content migrations will typically use this directory, but it is customizable with the CRAFT_CONTENT_MIGRATIONS_PATH variable.

# modules/

For a time, our starter project (opens new window) came with a pre-initialized custom module in the modules/ directory. This is typically harmless, but it cannot be removed without also modifying your project’s config/app.php file.

# public/

Older projects may have carried over a Craft 2 convention of naming their public web directory public/. There is no functional difference between these folder names, but most Craft resources will refer to it as web/.

# tests/

When using tests to validate application changes, you are apt to have a dedicated tests/ directory.

Documentation for automated testing of Craft 5 has not been published. The Craft 4 testing documentation is still available!

# translations/

Multi-site projects often make use of static translations, which are stored in this directory, indexed by their language code. Customize this location with the CRAFT_TRANSLATIONS_PATH variable.

# package.json

Projects that use Node.js will typically contain package.json and package-lock.json files, as well as a node_modules/ directory. Craft does not interact with these files, but they often contain information about how the front-end of your site works.

Oftentimes, a Node.js “build step” will output files that are then loaded by a user’s browser—those should be written to the web root so they can be directly requested via HTTP.

# craft.bat

A Windows-specific command line entry point or “batch file.”

# Docker Files

A Dockerfile or docker-compose.yml in your project root suggests that it is intended to be run in Docker (opens new window), a containerized development environment. DDEV users will typically not see these files, as they’re abstracted by configuration stored in the .ddev/ directory.

# IDE Configuration

Some editors write configuration to a file or folder within your project—for example, PhpStorm will create a .idea/ directory; Visual Studio Code uses .vscode/. Coordinate with your team about which tools are valuable to your process, and commit anything that supports it.