Installing Drupal 9 core with Composer

To avoid Drupal update nightmares, I have decided to use Composer to update Drupal Core and contributed modules, but I won't be using Drush.

As many webmasters out there, I am using a Windows 10 computer for development.

So I have installed WAMP64 https://www.wampserver.com/en/download-wampserver-64bits/ , which is in my opinion much more flexible and comfortable to use than XAMPP.

I also have installed Composer for Windows https://getcomposer.org/download/

The plan is to update the websites' local version and then to push the updated version to the production webserver.

Check here for more informatiuon:
https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/using-composer/starting-a-site-using-drupal-composer-project-templates

Open a Command Line Window with Admin privileges and navigate to C://WAMP64/www  or whereever your WAMP64 webroot is located.

To check if Composer is working, you can just type "composer". Then, make sure composer is up to date by typing "composer self-update".

To install a Drupal 9 project structure, you type:
"composer create-project drupal/recommended-project my_site_name_dir"

where my-site-name-dir is your project's folder (careful - it's not your webroot!)

that will install a composer project in that directory, the Drupal webroot being located one level below, in
"my_site_name_dir/web"

next, you want to create a database in WAMP64 - use phpmyadmin
* note: to avoid annoying problems with database charset and special characters, foreign characters, etc. my recommendation is to use the collation"utf8mb4_unicode_ci". This collation supports a very wide range of characters including Japanese emojis.

then, create a virtual host in WAMP64, for example using:
my_site_name_dir.com
C://WAMP64/www/my_site_name_dir/web

Next you restart DNS and visit your website in your browser and the Drupal installation process will begin.