Installing Drupal

There are many different methods to download Drupal and install it. In this recipe, we will focus on downloading Drupal from https://www.drupal.org/ and setting it up on a basic Linux, Apache, MySQL, or PHP (LAMP) server.

In this recipe, we will set up the files for Drupal 8 and step through the installation process.

Getting ready

Before we start, you will need a development environment that meets the new system requirements for Drupal 8:

• Apache 2.0 (or higher) or Nginx 1.1 (or higher) web server
• PHP 5.5.9 or higher, but PHP 5.6 or PHP 7 is recommended, as PHP 5.5 has reached its end-of-life support
• MySQL 5.5 or MariaDB 5.5.20 for your database

You will need a user with privileges to create databases or a created database with a user who has privileges to make tables in that database.

• Access to upload or move files to the server
• While a default installation of PHP will work with Drupal, it does require certain PHP extensions, such as mbstring. Check out https://www.drupal.org/requirements/php for up-to-date requirement information.

Drupal 8 ships with Symfony (https://symfony.com/) components. One of the new dependencies in Drupal 8, to support the Symfony routing system, is the Drupal Clean URL functionality. If the server is using Apache, ensure that mod_rewrite is enabled. If the server is using Nginx, the ngx_http_rewrite_module must be enabled.

We will download Drupal 8 and place its files in your web server's document root. This is the /var/www folder. If you used a tool, such as XAMPP, WAMP, or MAPP, consult the proper documentation to know your document root.

For full system requirements for Drupal 8, check out https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/system-requirements/. The Drupal.org documentation is currently being migrated. Also, review the Drupal 7 requirements page on https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/system-requirements/overview, which highlights Drupal 8 items, as well.

How to do it...

We need to follow these steps to install Drupal 8:

1. First, we will need to navigate to https://www.drupal.org/download and download the latest release of Drupal 8.x. You can find the most recent and recommended release on the https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal page for Drupal 8 (8.3.1, 8.4.0, and so on). Extract the archive and place the files in your document root as the drupal8 folder :

2. Open your browser and visit your web server, for example, http://localhost/drupal8, which will then take you to the Drupal installation wizard. You will land on the new multilingual options install screen. Select your language and click on Save and continue:

3. On the next screen, select the default Standard option for the installation profile. This will provide us with a standard configuration with the most commonly used modules installed.
4. The next step will verify your system requirements. If your system does not have any reportable issues, the screen will be skipped. If you do have any requirement conflicts, you can resolve them and click on the button to try again.

If you have requirement issues, the installer will report the specific issues. Nearly every requirement will link to a Drupal.org handbook page with solution steps.

5. Enter the database information for Drupal. In most cases, you will only need to supply the username, password, and database name and leave others as defaults. If your database does not exist, the installer will attempt to create the database:

See the There's more... section of this recipe for information on setting up your database.

6. Your Drupal 8 site will begin installing. When it is done installing the base modules, you will be taken to a site configuration screen.

 

7. The configure site form provides the base configuration for your Drupal site. Enter your site name and the email address for the site. The site email will be used to send administrative notifications and has the originating email for outgoing emails from the Drupal site. This form allows you to set regional information regarding the country and time zone of the site. Setting the timezone ensures that time values display correctly.
8. Fill in the site maintenance account information, also known as user 1, which acts in a similar way to the root on Unix-based systems. The site maintenance account is crucial. As stated, this acts as the first user and is given the user ID of 1. In Drupal, the user with the user ID of 1 often can bypass permission checks automatically and have global access.
9. Enter the site's regional information, and check whether the site should check for updates available for modules enabled and Drupal itself. By checking for updates automatically, your site will report anonymous usage statistics to Drupal along with providing a summary of your version status. You have the option to also opt-in for the site to email you notifications of new releases, including security releases.
10. When the information is satisfied, click on Save and continue, and congratulations, you installed Drupal! The next screen will provide you a link to your installed Drupal site.

How it works...

The Drupal installation process will provide a Drupal installation for the selected language and install modules and configuration based on the installation profile (standard or minimal in this recipe.)

When you visit the installer, it reads the language code from the browser. With this language code, it will then select a supported language. If you choose a non-English installation, the translation files will be automatically downloaded from https://localize.drupal.org/. Previous versions of Drupal did not support automated multilingual installs. More on multilingual will be covered in Chapter 8, Multilingual and Internationalization.

The installation profile instructs Drupal what modules to install by default. Contributed install profiles are termed distributions; we will discuss this more in the next recipe.

When verifying requirements, Drupal checks application versions and PHP configurations. For example, if your server has the PHP Xdebug (https://xdebug.org) extension installed, the minimum max_nesting_level must be 256 or else Drupal will not be installed (https://www.drupal.org/node/2393531).

There's more...

The Drupal installation process is straightforward, but there are a few things worth discussing.

Creating a database user and a database

As mentioned earlier, to install Drupal, you will need to have access to a database server (or the ability to create one) and an existing database (or the ability to create one). This process will depend on your environment setup.

If you are working with a hosting provider, there is more than likely a web-based control panel. This should allow you to create databases and users. Refer to your hosting provider's documentation for more information on this topic.

If you are using phpMyAdmin (https://www.phpmyadmin.net/) on your server, often installed by MAMP, WAMP, and XAMPP, and have root access, you can create your databases and users by following these steps:

1. Sign in to phpMyAdmin as the root user.
2. Click on Add a new User from the bottom of the privileges page.
3. Fill in the user's information.
4. Select to create a database for the user with all privileges granted.
5. You can now use that user's information to connect Drupal to your database.

If you do not have a user interface but have a command-line access, you can set up your database and user using the MySQL command line. These instructions can be found in the core/INSTALL.mysql.txt file. From the command line of your site, perform the following:

1. Log in to MySQL:

$ mysql -u username -p

2. Create the database; you will use the following command to create the my_database database:

$ CREATE DATABASE my_database CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

3. Create a new user to access the database:

$ CREATE USER username@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

4. Grant the new user permissions on the database, as follows:

$ GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES ON databasename.* TO 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

If you are installing Drupal with a PostgreSQL or SQLite database, check out the appropriate installation instructions, either INSTALL.pgsql.txt or INSTALL.sqlite.txt.

Database prefixes

Drupal, like other content management systems, allows you to prefix its database tables from the database set-up form. This prefix will be placed before table names to help make them unique. Although it is not recommended, this would allow multiple installations to share one database. Utilizing table prefixes can, however, provide some level of security through obscurity since the tables will not be their default names:

Downloading and installing with Drush

You may also install Drupal using the PHP command-line tool, Drush. Drush is a command-line tool created by the Drupal community and must be installed if you wish to use it. Drush is covered in Chapter 13, The Drupal CLI.

As of Drush 9, which supports Drupal 8.3+, this section is deprecated. Using Drush to download Drupal core or contributed modules will throw a warning to use Composer instead.

The pm-download command will download packages from Drupal.org. The site-install command will allow you to specify an installation profile and other options to install a Drupal site. The installation steps in this recipe could be run through Drush, as follows:

$ cd /path/to/web
$ drush pm-download drupal-8 drupal8
$ cd drupal8
$ drush site-install standard -locale=en-US --account-name=admin --account-pass=admin [email protected] -db-url=mysql://user:pass@localhost/database
  

We used Drush to download the latest Drupal 8 and place it in a folder named drupal8. Then, the site-install command instructs Drush to use the standard install profile, configure the maintenance account, and provide a database URI string so that Drupal can connect to its database.

Using Composer to create a Drupal site

You can download Drupal using Composer, the de facto PHP package manager. The preferred method is to use the Drupal Composer project template provided by the community.

To build your Drupal 8 site, run the following commands:

$ cd /path/to/document/root
$ composer create-project drupal-composer/drupal-project drupal8 --stability dev

Wait for the commands to finish--it may take some time, as it downloads all the required dependencies. You can feel free to grab a coffee (the first time takes a while; it primes caches. Have faith, it will be much faster the next time.)

When finished, you will find a different directory structure inside your drupal8 directory. The vendor directory contains all third-party PHP libraries, and the web directory contains your Drupal 8 site. You will need to modify your web server to use the web directory as the new docroot within your drupal8 directory.

The project and its details can be found at https://github.com/drupal-composer/drupal-project, along with its full documentation.

Security updates

If you choose to disable the update options, you will have to check manually for module upgrades. While most upgrades are for bug fixes or features, some are for security updates. It is highly recommended that you subscribe to the Drupal security team's updates. These updates are available on Twitter at @drupalsecurity (https://twitter.com/drupalsecurity) or the feeds on
https://www.drupal.org/security.

See also

• For more on multilingual, check out Chapter 8, Multilingual and Internationalization
• For more on using the command line and Drupal, check out Chapter 13, The Drupal CLI
• Check out the Drupal.org handbook on installing Drupal at https://www.drupal.org/documentation/install
• Check out the Drupal.org handbook that discusses Drupal 8 and Composer at https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/using-composer/using-composer-with-drupal
• Check out more information on Drush site install at https://drushcommands.com/drush-8x/core/site-install/