[Winter](https://wintercms.com) is a free, open-source content management system based on the [Laravel](https://laravel.com) PHP framework. Developers and agencies all around the world rely upon Winter for its quick prototyping and development, safe and secure codebase and dedication to simplicity.
Winter can be installed in several ways for both new users and experienced developers - see our [Installation page](https://wintercms.com/install) for more information.
Run the following command with the folder created by the previous command to generate an environment file which will contain your configuration settings:
After configuring your installation, you can run the following command to run the database migrations and automatically create an administrator account with the username `admin`. The password of this account will be automatically generated and displayed in your terminal.
The best place to learn Winter is by [reading the documentation](https://wintercms.com/docs) or [following some tutorials](https://wintercms.com/blog/category/tutorials). You can also join the maintenance team and our active community on [Discord](https://discord.gg/D5MFSPH6Ux) who are always willing to help out with questions.
Winter was forked from October CMS in March 2021 due to a difference in open source management philosophies between the core maintainer team and the two founders of October.
The development of Winter is lead by [Luke Towers](https://luketowers.ca/), along with many wonderful people that dedicate their time to help support and grow the community. The [Frostbyte Foundation](mailto:hello@frostbytefoundation.org) provides an organisational backing for the project and the continued development of Winter, its plugins and themes and its ecosystem.
Winter is built on top of the wildly-popular [Laravel](https://laravel.com) framework for PHP, with the in-house [Storm](https://github.com/wintercms/storm) library as a buffer between the Laravel framework and the Winter project, to minimize breaking changes and improve stability.
Before contributing issues or pull requests, be sure to review the [Contributing Guidelines](https://github.com/wintercms/.github/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md) first.
In order to ensure that the Winter community is welcoming to all, please review and abide by the [Code of Conduct](https://github.com/wintercms/.github/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md).
Froala provides a perpetual, Enterprise license to Winter CMS which allows us and our users to use the Froala WYSIWYG Editor in Winter CMS powered projects.
If you would like to have your name, company and link added to this list and support open-source development, feel free to make a donation to our [Open Collective](https://opencollective.com/wintercms).