Wheelhouse

Installation & Deployment Guide: Quick-Start Guide

This Quick-Start Guide will walk you through the initial installation and setup phase of your Wheelhouse-backed site. After this short process, you will have a local development environment running Wheelhouse CMS, ready to start building your themes and plugins.

This guide assumes that a) you have a Wheelhouse CMS license, and b) your system has the minimum requirements installed, including MongoDB and Ruby on Rails. See Installing Dependencies for details on how to install these packages.

1. Create a Wheelhouse application

From within your Wheelhouse Account (available soon), copy and run the unique generator command for your license:

$ rails new WheelhouseDemo -O -m http://www.wheelhousecms.com/template/6e76a20fd07a86d62922a4ef1da34171

This command creates a new Rails application, adds in the Wheelhouse gem sources, removes the default Rails index.html file, and creates a public media directory and symlink. It then runs bundle install, which downloads and installs all of the required Rails and Wheelhouse gems.

The -O option skips ActiveRecord support which isn't necessary for Wheelhouse CMS, but you can safely remove this option if you want to use your own custom ActiveRecord models.

2. Start the server

Change into your newly created Rails application and start the server:

$ cd WheelhouseDemo
$ rails server

This starts the Rails server on port 3000.

3. Run the Wheelhouse setup process

Open your web browser to http://localhost:3000/. This begins the setup process which:

  1. Configures your database connection.
  2. Creates a new site.
  3. Creates an initial admin user.

After following these steps, you will be taken to the Wheelhouse CMS dashboard.

4. Generate a theme

You will most likely want to create a custom theme to build your site. A theme named demo can be created by running:

$ rails generate wheelhouse:theme demo

Restart your Rails server and browse to the Site Options page to select the newly created theme.

From here you can begin to build your site and customize your theme. See the Site Administrator's Guide and the Theme Developer's Guide for details on how to do this.