Wagtail is distributed as a Python package, to be incorporated into a Django project via the INSTALLED_APPS setting. To get you up and running quickly, we provide a demo site with all the configuration in place, including a set of example page types.

We recommend running Wagtail in a virtual machine using Vagrant, as this ensures that the correct dependencies are in place regardless of how your host machine is set up.

• VirtualBox
• Vagrant 1.1+

Run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo.git
cd wagtaildemo
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
  (then, within the SSH session:)
./manage.py createsuperuser
./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

This will make the app accessible on the host machine as http://localhost:8111/ - you can access the Wagtail admin interface at http://localhost:8111/admin/ . The codebase is located on the host machine, exported to the VM as a shared folder; code editing and Git operations will generally be done on the host.

The above setup is all you need for trying out the demo site and building Wagtail-powered sites. To develop Wagtail itself, you'll need a working copy of the Wagtail codebase alongside your demo site, shared with your VM so that it is picked up instead of the packaged copy of Wagtail. From the location where you cloned wagtaildemo:

git clone https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail.git
cd wagtaildemo
cp Vagrantfile.local.example Vagrantfile.local
    (edit Vagrantfile.local to specify the path to the wagtail codebase, if required)
cp wagtaildemo/settings/local.py.example wagtaildemo/settings/local.py
    (uncomment the lines from 'import sys' onward, and edit the rest of local.py as appropriate)

If your VM is currently running, you'll then need to run vagrant halt followed by vagrant up for the changes to take effect.

Don't want to set up a whole VM to try out Wagtail? No problem.

• PostgreSQL
• npm
• CoffeeScript
• LESS
• PIP

With PostgreSQL running (and configured to allow you to connect as the 'postgres' user - if not, you'll need to adjust the createdb line and the database settings in wagtaildemo/settings/base.py accordingly), run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo.git
cd wagtaildemo
pip install -r requirements/dev.txt
createdb -Upostgres wagtaildemo
./manage.py syncdb
./manage.py migrate
./manage.py createsuperuser
./manage.py runserver

SQLite is supported as an alternative to PostgreSQL - update the DATABASES setting in wagtaildemo/settings/base.py to use 'django.db.backends.sqlite3', as you would with a regular Django project.