Minimum Setup

This website contains links to software which is either no longer maintained or will be supported only until the end of 2019 (CKFinder 2). For the latest documentation about current CKSource projects, including software like CKEditor 4/CKEditor 5, CKFinder 3, Cloud Services, Letters, Accessibility Checker, please visit the new documentation website.

If you look for an information about very old versions of CKEditor, FCKeditor and CKFinder check also the CKEditor forum, which was closed in 2015. If not, please head to StackOverflow for support.

CKEditor is highly customizable and can be adjusted to your needs. In order to make your customization efforts easier, below you will find a summary of the contents of the CKEditor installation package. This should help you minimize the number of files deployed to the production server in case you wanted to only use the bare minimum that can make CKEditor work. If needed, you can go through the file list below and manually remove some of them according to your needs.

  • _samples – this directory contains CKEditor samples. Using the sample files is the easiest way to verify whether your setup works properly. If CKEditor works correctly, you can safely remove the whole _ samples folder.
  • _source – this directory contains CKEditor source code. It is needed only if you intend to use the ckeditor_source.js script and load CKEditor from source files.
  • adapters – this directory contains CKEditor adapters. It may be removed if you do not use any adapters, like the jQuery one.
  • images – this directory contains CKEditor graphics files. It is necessary for CKEditor to work.
  • lang – this directory contains CKEditor language files. It is necessary for CKEditor to work, although you can remove the unused language files if you force the CKEditor interface language using the CKEDITOR.config.language property set in the config.js file.
  • plugins – this directory contains the plugin files and is necessary for CKEditor to work. Due to the modular construction of the editor some core functionality was delegated to plugins. You can remove some unused plugins that are not packed in ckeditor.js (and thus listed in the ckeditor.pack file) and are only loaded on demand through the CKEDITOR.config.extraPlugins property.
  • skins – this directory contains CKEditor skin files along with toolbar buttons and stylesheet definitions and is necessary for CKEditor to work. You can however remove unused skins and their files.
  • themes – is necessary for CKEditor to work.


From the CKEditor root directory you can safely remove the following files:

  • CHANGES.html
  • All .asp files (if you do not use ASP integration)
  • All .php files (if you do not use PHP integration)
  • ckeditor.pack
  • ckeditor_basic.js and ckeditor_basic_source.js files (if you do not use this method for loading CKEditor)
  • ckeditor_source.js (if you do not use this method for loading CKEditor)
  • INSTALL.html
This page was last edited on 30 April 2012, at 11:57.