# Requirements

Statamic is a modern PHP application built as a [Laravel](https://laravel.com) package, which carries with it the same [server requirements](https://laravel.com/docs/13.x/deployment#server-requirements) as Laravel itself. To manipulate images (resize, crop, etc), you will also need the GD Library or ImageMagick installed on your server.

## Server requirements

To run Statamic you'll need a server meeting the following requirements. These are standard defaults (at minimum) for most modern hosting platforms.

- PHP 8.3 or above
- BCMath PHP Extension
- Ctype PHP Extension
- Exif PHP Extension
- JSON PHP Extension
- Mbstring PHP Extension
- OpenSSL PHP Extension
- PDO PHP Extension
- Tokenizer PHP Extension
- XML PHP Extension
- GD Library or ImageMagick
- Composer

## Development environments

Depending on your operating system, we recommend the following development environments:

### macOS and Windows: Laravel Herd

[Laravel Herd](https://herd.laravel.com) is a blazing fast, native development environment for macOS and Windows. Herd includes `php`, `composer` and `npm` - *almost* everything you need to setup Statamic locally.

We've written [a guide](/installing/laravel-herd.md) on installing Herd and setting up your Statamic site.

### Linux

To develop locally with Statamic on Linux, you'll need to install `php`, `composer` and `npm`.

If you're using Ubuntu (or another variant of Debian), you may find our [Ubuntu guide](/installing/ubuntu.md) helpful.

## Recommended hosts

Statamic runs on any host that meets the requirements above. See our [recommended hosts](/knowledge-base/recommended-hosts.md) page for the host we recommend, along with a user-curated list of others that do (and don't) play well with Statamic.