# Lithium Requirements You need a web server to run Lithium, preferably running on your local machine (you do all of your development locally, right, right??). As PHP, Lithium runs fine on most all popular web servers. Setup guides are available for Apache, Cherokee, Lighttpd, and Nginx. Because Lithium takes advantage of advanced language features, the minimum version requirement is PHP 5.3. * Web server * PHP 5.3+ Applications built with Lithium often feature some sort of data store. As such, you may want to track down one of the following as well: * MongoDB * MySQL * SQLite * CouchDB While not absolutely essential, a working knowledge of the [Git version control system](http://git-scm.com/) is useful for most aspects of development in general, and Lithium specifically. The Lithium plugin installation/repository tools rely on Git, and the workflow for contributing to projects is Git-based. * Git Also not required for working with Lithium itself, however it provides many useful tools for automating complex or repetitive tasks. * Command-line terminal For innovation and collaboration: * Passion!