Fire up your Magnolia CMS project with Magnolia CLI

Magnolia CMS offers a really neat and novel way to get running quickly with development. There’s a CLI (command line interface) that can be installed from NPM to start up Magnolia quickly and easily.

npm install @magnolia/cli -g

(you may need to use sudo on some systems to install this)

This gives you the ‘mgnl’ command. If you now use ‘mgnl jumpstart’ it’ll offer you a list of choices, including the DX versions (you’ll need a username and password). The tool will download the right version, set it up, and bootstrap the project ready to run.

You can then start up Magnolia CMS with ‘mgnl start’ and away you go. It’s really that easy, and very well geared towards development with light modules. Of course, you’ll need to have Java 8+ and NPM already installed, but you already should have these if you’re planning on working with Magnolia CMS.

At the moment the recommended versions of Java and Node are JDK 11 and Node 12, but be sure to check the documentation. As a general rule, the LTS versions are usually the right choice.
To get information on the commands available use: mgnl help

C:\>mgnl help
Usage: mgnl <command> [options]

A tool to setup and facilitate light development with Magnolia CMS

Options:
  -v, --version           output the version number
  -h, --help              output usage information

Commands:
  jumpstart               download and setup a Magnolia CMS instance for development.
  start                   start up a Magnolia CMS instance. To stop it, enter CTRL+C
  add-availability        add component availability.
  build                   scan a node_modules folder for npm packages with the keyword "magnolia-light-module" (in package.json) and extract them to a directory of choice.
  create-app              create an app.
  create-block            create a block.
  create-component        create a component and optionally add availability for it.
  create-content-type     create a content type.
  create-light-module     create a light module.
  create-page             create a page template.
  create-virtual-uri      create a virtual uri mapping.
  customize-local-config  extract "mgnl-cli-prototypes" folder and "mgnl-cli.json" file to customize CLI configuration.
  install                 install a light module from npm to the local Magnolia instance.
  search                  search for a light module on npm.
  tab-completion          install tab autocomplete feature for Bash, zsh or PowerShell
  version                 display mgnl and node.js versions
  help [cmd]              display help for [cmd]
  mgnl: 3.1.0 node: v12.11.1 os: win32
As you can see from the list of commands, it’s possible to create a new Magnolia CMS instance, start it, and create various parts of your application using this tool. 

You can find the official documentation on Magnolia CLI here in the Magnolia documentation: https://documentation.magnolia-cms.com/display/DOCS61/Magnolia+CLI