Creating a Project in PhpStorm

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In the Look at the PhpStorm IDE Interface tutorial, we've seen what projects are and why PhpStorm uses them. In this tutorial, we'll see how
we can create a new project or open an existing project and what the different options are.
The Welcome screen
Create New Project
Open Project
Create New Project from Existing Files
Check out from Version Control

The Welcome screen

After launching PhpStorm for the very first time (or when there is no open project), we will see the Welcome screen. We can bring it up by closing
the active project using the File | Close Project menu.
The Welcome screen lets us:
Create or open a project
Check out a project from version control (VCS)
Configure the IDE settings
View documentation

In this tutorial, we will be using the Welcome screen to create and open projects. All actions can be invoked from an open project in the
IDE as well. Explore the File and VCS menu and familiarize yourself with the available options.

Create New Project

We can create a new project from scratch, by clicking the Create New Project button. We will see the following window open.

From this window, we can provide the project name, the path where it will be stored and select the project type we want to create.
Depending on the plugins that are installed and enabled in our PhpStorm installation, this list may be different.
Empty Project will create an empty project with no contents in it.
PHP Empty project will create an empty project with a simple PHP file in it.
Composer Project allows creating a project based on a Composer package. Check Composer Support in PhpStorm for more
information about this option.
Drupal Module will create a new Drupal module. See Drupal Development using PhpStorm for more information.
App Engine Project will create a "Hello World" PHP project that has Google App Engine support enabled. See Getting Started with
PhpStorm as Google App Engine PHP IDE to learn more about this.
WordPress Plugin creates a Wordpress plugin. Check WordPress Development using PhpStorm for a full tutorial.
HTML5 Boilerplate installs the HTML5 boilerplate HTML, CSS and JavaScript files into a new project.
Twitter Bootsrap installs the Twitter Bootstrap HTML, CSS and JavaScript into a new project.

Open Project
Clicking the Open... button will show a dialog where we can select an existing PhpStorm project that we want to open. When selecting a directory
(or file) from our filesystem, PhpStorm will create a new project based on that directory or file.

Create New Project from Existing Files

The Create New Project from Existing Files button opens a wizard where we can set up new projects around existing files that reside locally or
on remote hosts.

The wizard expects an initial choice on where the project sources are stored and how the web server is configured. Depending on this choice, the
wizard will show different follow-up steps that configure FTP/SFTP/FTPS access, the local directory where the files will be copied, how the
webserver is configured and how the document root of the web server relates to the project.
Let's pick one of the options: Web server is on remote host, files are accessible via FTP/SFTP/FTPS. This option will first let us configure where
files have to be stored locally.

Next, we will have to specify if we want to configure a remote server or if we want to use a server that was configured in previous projects.

PhpStorm asks for a descriptive name of the remote server, as well as connection details. The server can be FTP, SFTP, FTPS or a file share in
the local network.

Of course, the remote file system may be different from our local filesystem. The wizard provides us with a means of mapping where project files
are stored on the remote server so only the required files are downloaded and synchronized.

After this, we can specify how the web URL maps to our project.

Clicking OK will download the remote files and configure PhpStorm so we can start working with the project.
For more information on how remote servers and deployments related to a PhpStorm project, check the Deployments in PhpStorm tutor
ial.

Check out from Version Control

When a project is located in a Version Control System or VCS like Git, Mercurial, Subversion, Perforce, ClearCase, Team Foundation Server or
any of the other VCS types supported by PhpStorm, we can clone the VCS contents to disk by clicking the Check out from Version Control butt
on. We will then have to select the VCS type.

Depending on the selection, we can provide the repository connection details (for example the Git Repository URL) and the local directory where
we want to clone or checkout sources.

After this, sources will be downloaded from the VCS and opened as a PhpStorm project.
PhpStorm comes with GitHub-specific integrations. See this blog post for some examples.

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