Umbraco 9 Installation and Configuration

Umbraco 9 has just been released and looks promising.

In this version, the CMS gets rid of the old .NET Framework stack and moves toward the more modern .NET 5.

As you can imagine a web project based on .NET 5 is different from the classic ASP.NET. If you are interested in the previous version of Umbraco (version 8) I wrote an article some time ago on how to install and configure a Umbraco 8 environment. 

In this article, I proceed to the creation of the Umbraco 9 project using what in my opinion is the simplest and fastest method: the .NET CLI.

Using the .NET CLI is easy as Umbraco also released specific project templates.

So, first of all, let's install the templates.

Do it running the following command in the CLI:

dotnet new -i Umbraco.Templates::*

In my case this was the result:

Note that having version 9.0.0 already installed on my machine, the command just updated the templates to version 9.0.1 (the latest version available at the moment). Therefore the command also acts as an "updater" if templates are already there.

Then we create the project with the command:

dotnet new umbraco --SqlCe -n UmbracoDemo

Note the --SqlCe option. It's not mandatory. It just says to install all the necessary dependencies to be able to work on SQL Server CE databases (this is what I want for my local environment).

This is the result in the CLI:

And we can find the generated project in our filesystem:

Since we want to develop the project using Visual Studio we create a solution file (.sln) to link the project to. It will allow us to open the project in Visual Studio. Let's do it with the commands:

dotnet new sln

dotnet sln add UmbracoDemo

The result:

Everything's ready now. Build and run the project:

dotnet run --project UmbracoDemo

Navigate the URL in the browser and Umbraco 9 installation guide will start:

Open the project in Visual Studio and look if everything is ok and ready to start working with.

Double click the solution file previously created and Visual Studio will start:

It is all ready. The Umbraco 9 journey begins.

Happy coding!