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Installation

You can install Timber through Composer. If you’re not familiar with Composer yet, read our short introduction and then come back here.

In earlier versions of Timber, you could install Timber as a WordPress plugin. We dropped support for that, because Timber is not really a plugin. Plugins are supposed to enhance functionality. But when you're developing with Timber, it’s really a dependency — and Composer is the premier PHP dependency manager.

Install Timber into an existing project #

To install Timber, you can use the following command:

composer require timber/timber

Now in which folder do you run that command?

You can choose yourself where in your project you want to include Timber.

  • Some developers prefer to have Timber installed as a theme dependency, so they would run this command from the theme root (ex: /wp-content/themes/my-theme/).
  • Others want to use Timber as a WordPress dependency, which means you would run the command above from the WordPress root (ex: /var/www/).

If your theme or project is not already set up to pull in Composer’s autoload file, you will need to add the following line at the top of your functions.php file:

// Load Composer dependencies.
require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

// Initialize Timber.
Timber\Timber::init();

Use the Starter Theme #

If you want to use Timber’s Starter Theme, you can use composer create-project. Run the following command from the wp-content/themes folder of your WordPress installation.

composer create-project upstatement/timber-starter-theme --no-dev

This command will install the Starter Theme with Timber included as a Composer dependency.

1. Navigate to your WordPress themes directory #

Like where twentyeighteen and twentynineteen live, the Timber Starter Theme will live at the same level.

/wp-content/themes/twentyeighteen
                  /twentynineteen
                  /timber-starter-theme

You should now have:

/wp-content/themes/timber-starter-theme

You should probably rename this to something better.

2. Select your theme in WordPress #

Navigate to the Manage Themes page in your WordPress admin (Appearance → Themes). Select the timber-starter-theme theme from the step above (or whatever you renamed it to).

3. Let’s write our theme! #

Dive right in or use the Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to develop themes with Timber.