I build Ecommerce stores for a living (Magento Open Source primarily), and the part that has always been the worst is the very beginning, especially so if you're on a team of people. Getting a working local environment means setting up the right PHP version and extensions, Redis/Valkey, OpenSearch, nginx, MySQL/MariaDB, a mail catcher, and a Magento install that takes long enough to make you doubt your life choices. It truly is death by one-thousand cuts. Pointless hours of yak-shaving before you have written a single line of anything useful. It is also the exact point where a non-technical person who wants to try Magento gives up.

With the agentic era upon us, I wanted to accomplish a few things:

1. Make it possible to spin up a new store in a single button click

2. Make it stupidly easy to bring in an AI agent to assist in development.

3. Potentially (and this is why the starter generator site is so over-eager on AI) allow merchants to build stores themselves with limited developer involvement.

Point 3 is more "research" for me at the moment. I don't know if this is sane or insane, but it's an idea that I've been entertaining for a year or so now. I've seen various posts on Hacker News about people having their PMs "write code" (for better or worse), why not let the even-more lay-user try it?

This all aside, I have previously spent a stupid amount of time attempting to solve this exact problem over the past few years. Pre-AI, I wrote two local docker environments (magedocker / mage2docker) that eventually sucked for various reasons so I stopped maintaining them.

For anything new that I would build for myself, I wanted a few key elements that I think are critical to success of the resultant ecommerce store:

- Working devcontainer out of the box

- The ability to easily choose between different storefronts / distros (different clients want different things, who knew?)

- Pre-packaged tools that I use every day to do my work.

- Pre-packaged CI so that I don't have to re-invent the wheel each time I work for a new merchant.

- Claude built-in (it's the AI-of-choice for me at the moment)

Recently, a few things came together simultaneously and I felt that it was high time I packaged all of these new ideas I've been noodling on and iterating towards into a single bundle. As such, you can now click a button, have GitHub create a repo from the template, and boot a Codespace with a fully configured store in your browser. PHP, nginx, MariaDB, Mailpit, the distro, and a storefront, either Hyvä (the PHP-rendered theme) or Daffodil (an Angular headless storefront I maintain). These are all running and wired together out-of-the-box. You can pick Magento Open Source or Mage-OS, and there's a Mage-OS Minimal if you want barebones. You don't need to install anything locally if you just want to use Codespaces. From "click" to "a store you can open" is about 8 minutes. I can probably shorten this duration, but it'll take some further time and research.

There are still rough edges, and I have a bunch of documentation to write, but I'm reasonably happy with how it all came out.

The template, the pipelines, the frameworks themselves, the devcontainer, etc. are free and open source. The only things you pay for are Codespaces / Claude. Codespaces is even free for 30 hours / mo (with this environment). So, if you have a Claude license, you can just play around.

Here’s the things I sourced together:

- Starter templates:

  - Magento + Hyvä: https://github.com/graycoreio/magento2-ai-starter-hyva

  - Magento + Daffodil: https://github.com/graycoreio/magento2-ai-starter-daffodil

  - Mage-OS + Hyvä: https://github.com/graycoreio/mage-os-ai-starter-hyva

  - Mage-OS + Daffodil: https://github.com/graycoreio/mage-os-ai-starter-daffodil

  - Mage-OS Minimal (no storefront): https://github.com/graycoreio/mage-os-ai-starter-minimal