Creating a site

A site is your own copy of wordpress-develop, the WordPress core development repository, cloned into a folder you choose. You can create as many sites as you like — each one is an independent checkout with its own working tree.

You do not need one, though, for every ticket you work on. A site holds as many tickets as you like, each on its own branch, and moving between them costs seconds rather than another clone and another build — see Working on several tickets. Create a second site when you want a genuinely separate environment: a different snapshot of trunk, or somewhere to test a patch without disturbing the site you are working in.

When the app starts with no sites, the main area shows a short prompt to create your first one.

Start the creation flow

Click Create WordPress Core site at the bottom of the sidebar. A dialog opens with two fields.

• Site name — the label shown in the sidebar. It also determines the folder name: spaces and characters that are not valid in file names become hyphens, so a site named My WordPress site lives in a folder called My-WordPress-site.
• Site location — the parent folder where the site will be created. The app adds a new directory inside it for the project; it does not clone into the folder you pick directly.

Click Create site (or press Enter) to start. Cancel or Escape closes the dialog without creating anything.

What happens during setup

The app clones the wordpress-develop repository from GitHub. Git is bundled with the app as isomorphic-git, a pure JavaScript implementation, so no system Git installation is involved.

While the clone runs, the site view shows a Setting up new site… card with the current phase and a terminal panel streaming progress output. The clone downloads the full repository, so expect it to take several minutes depending on your connection.

The clone is the first step of the initial setup checklist; the remaining steps (installing dependencies, building, starting the dev server) stay locked until it finishes, then you drive them yourself.

If setup fails, the half-created site is removed from the list — the row simply disappears. The reason goes to the application log rather than to a dialog, so Help → Open App Log is where to look when a site never finishes.

Where sites live on disk

Each site is an ordinary folder on your disk: the parent folder you chose in Site location, plus a directory named after the site. Inside is a normal wordpress-develop checkout — you can open it in any editor or file manager. The app only records the path and some metadata; deleting a site from the app can also delete this folder (see Managing sites).

The site list

Every site appears in the sidebar, newest first. Click a site to switch to it; the button for the active site is highlighted. The chevron at the top collapses the sidebar to a narrow strip showing only each site's initial.

A colored dot next to a site name warns that it has fallen behind trunk:

• Amber — the checkout is more than 14 days old.
• Red — a previous update moved the code but never finished installing or rebuilding.

Both are fixed by updating to the latest trunk — you never need to create a new site just to get newer code.