To begin, you’ll need:

1. Apache
2. PHP (5.6.3 or higher)

If you’re starting from scratch, recommend installing your flavor of XAMPP or MAMP. Make sure to install the Apache and PHP modules. Once installed:

1. Place the files within PvPoke’s src directory somewhere in your htdocs folder, preferably in its own subdirectory
2. Run XAMPP or MAMP (from the control panel or through the “start” executable)
3. In your browser, navigate to localhost/{subdirectory} and the site should run

If you are running the site in a subdirectory, you’ll need to edit the modules/config.php file and change the $WEB_ROOT variable declaration to:

$WEB_ROOT = '/{subdirectory}/';

Because we’re flexible like that.

If you haven’t already, you may need to change your Apache settings to allow .htaccess to modify incoming requests. If you’re using XAMPP, find the apache/conf/httpd.config file and change:

<Directory />
    AllowOverride None
    Require all denied
</Directory>

To the following:

<Directory />
    AllowOverride All
    Require all denied
</Directory>

You can also set this specifically for the project directory. You may need to restart the server afterward.

You can also run PvPoke on a different environment. Note that some developer features will only appear when "localhost" is part of the hostname.

You can easily run PvPoke using docker by following these steps:

1. Install docker
2. Install docker-compose
3. Run PvPoke using the following command from the directory where you extracted (or cloned) PvPoke files:

$ docker-compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml up --build

This also works with podman and podman-compose