# Installation
# What is Acorn?
Acorn is a way to use Laravel components inside of WordPress (opens new window).
# Why use Acorn?
Acorn brings elements of the Laravel ecosystem to any WordPress plugin or theme.
To put it simply, Acorn provides a way to gracefully load a Laravel application container inside of WordPress while respecting the WordPress lifecycle and template hierarchy.
This means you get access to Laravel's artisan commands through the use of wp acorn. You can utilize Blade for on-the-fly rendering of your Blade views. You gain access to third-party packages built specifically for Acorn. And we provide some first-party components as well, such as view composers and assets management.
# Installing Acorn with Composer
Install Acorn on your WordPress install managed by Composer, such as with Bedrock (opens new window):
$ composer require roots/acorn
We also recommend adding Acorn's postAutoloadDump function to Composer's post-autoload-dump event in composer.json:
"post-autoload-dump": [
"Roots\\Acorn\\ComposerScripts::postAutoloadDump"
]
# Installing Acorn as a plugin
Although not officially supported, the following options should work. Please file a bug report (opens new window) for future consideration if you run into issues.
- Install as mu-plugin.
Download the most recent version of Acorn (opens new window) and extract to your
mu-pluginsdirectory. Make sure you have a mechanism in place to autoload it, such asbedrock-autoloader(opens new window). - Install as a normal plugin.
Download the most recent version of Acorn (opens new window) and extract to your
pluginsdirectory. Make sure to activate the plugin, or it won't work.
# Server Requirements
Acorn's server requirements are minimal, and mostly come from WordPress and Laravel 8's requirements (opens new window).
- PHP >=7.3 or >=8.0
- WordPress >= 5.4
- BCMath PHP Extension
- Ctype PHP Extension
- Fileinfo PHP Extension
- JSON PHP Extension
- Mbstring PHP Extension
- Tokenizer PHP Extension
- XML PHP Extension
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