A component's root directory is the top-level directory for that component under which its folders and files are located. Depending on how your Magento development environment was installed, your component's root directory can be located in two places:
-
<Magento install directory>/app
: This is the recommended location for component development. You can easily set up this type of environment by Cloning the Magento 2 GitHub repository.- For modules, use
app/code
. - For storefront themes, use
app/design/frontend
. - For Admin themes, use
app/design/adminhtml
. - For language packages, use
app/i18n
.
- For modules, use
-
<Magento install directory>/vendor
: This location is found in the alternative setups where thecomposer create-project
command was used to get a Magento 2 metapackage (which downloads the CE or EE code), or a compressed Magento 2 archive was extracted in order to install Magento.Any third party components (and the Magento application itself) are downloaded and stored under the
vendor
directory. If you are using Git to manage project, this directory is typically added to the.gitignore
file. Therefore, we recommend you do your customization work inapp/code
, notvendor
.
The following files are required for all components:
registration.php
: Among other things, this file specifies the directory in which the component is installed by vendors in production environments. By default, composer automatically installs components in the<Magento root dir>/vendor
directory. For more information, see Component registration.composer.json
: Specifies component dependencies and other metadata. For more information, see Composer integration.