The bin/magento tool and developer mode

Almost all Magento management happens in the console: enabling a module, cleaning the cache, updating the database. The project has the bin/magento file for that. After every change, the lessons of this course name the command to run to see the result.

Running

The command is run from the project root:

bin/magento list

It prints the list of all available commands grouped by topic: cache, module, setup and others. If the file does not run directly, type php bin/magento list.

Help for a single command is shown by the --help option:

bin/magento cache:clean --help

Developer mode

After installation the default mode is active. For working on code it is changed right away:

bin/magento deploy:mode:set developer

The command prints Enabled developer mode. In this mode PHP errors are shown on the page instead of being hidden in a log, and styles and generated classes are created on demand.

Everyday commands

Command	What it does
`module:status`	Shows enabled and disabled modules
`module:enable Name`	Enables a module
`setup:upgrade`	Registers new modules, updates tables, runs patches
`cache:clean`	Cleans the Magento cache
`cache:flush`	Empties the whole cache storage
`indexer:reindex`	Recalculates catalog indexes
`setup:di:compile`	Generates classes in advance; needed on a production server

What to run after a change

Magento remembers a lot: merged XML files, rendered pages, generated classes. So an edit is not always visible right away.

What you changed	What to do
A PHP file, constructor untouched	Nothing
A class constructor	Delete the contents of the `generated` folder
Any XML file in `etc` or a layout	`bin/magento cache:clean`
A `.phtml` template	`bin/magento cache:clean` if the block and page caches are on
A new module, `db_schema.xml`, a patch	`bin/magento setup:upgrade`

Cache during development

To avoid cleaning the cache after every template edit, the caches of rendered pages and blocks are disabled:

bin/magento cache:disable full_page block_html

The other cache types stay enabled — without them the shop is very slow. The "Cache and indexers" lesson covers caching in detail.

Common mistake

Commands are run as a different user, for example root. Files in the var and generated folders then belong to that user, the web server cannot change them, and the page fails with a permission error. Run bin/magento as the same user that PHP runs under on the server.

Thanks for reading!