Drupal

Drupal Installation

Christopher Simpson

Jan 22, 2018 • 3 min read

Server Requirements
Installing Laravel
Configuration
Web Server Configuration
Pretty URLs

Server Requirements

Drupal has a few system requirements.

You will need to make sure your server meets the following requirements:

PHP >= 7.1
XML extension
GD library
PHP OpenSSL
JSON (usually compiled by default anyway)
cURL
Mbstring

Installing Drupal

Drupal utilizes Composer to manage its dependencies. So, before using Drupal, make sure you have Composer installed on your machine.

Via Composer Create-Project

First, cd into your web root on your localhost e.g: cd /var/www/public_html

Now download the Drupal installer using Composer:

composer create-project drupal-composer/drupal-project:8.x-dev ./ --stability dev --no-interaction

Composer will put your website files into a directory called web.

Get Drupal Console

Install Global Drupal Console Launcher

curl https://drupalconsole.com/installer -L -o drupal.phar
mv drupal.phar /usr/local/bin/drupal
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/drupal

Add Drupal Console to project

composer require drupal/console:~1.0 \
--prefer-dist \
--optimize-autoloader

Local Development Server

If you have PHP installed locally and you would like to use PHP's Built-in web server to serve your application, you may use the php -S command. Change directory into the web folder, then this command will start a development server at http://localhost:8000:

php -S localhost:8000

Will bring up the install steps. You'll need to create a database (e.g. using mysql or phpMyAdmin).

How to install drupal

... It's pretty self explanatory.

Configuration

Public Directory

After installing Drupal, you should configure your web server's document / web root to be the web directory. The index.php in this directory serves as the front controller for all HTTP requests entering your application.

Configuration Files

All of the configuration files for Drupal are stored in the /web/sites/default/ directory. Each option is documented, so feel free to look through the files and get familiar with the options available to you.

Directory Permissions

After installing Drupal, you may need to configure some permissions. Directories within the storage /web/sites/default/files directories should be writable by your web server.

Application Key

The next thing you should do after installing Drupal is set your application key to a random string. If you installed Drupal via the Drupal installer, this key has already been set for you by the installer.

For enhanced security, you may set this variable to the contents of a file outside your document root; you should also ensure that this file is not stored with backups of your database.

Additional Configuration

Drupal needs almost no other configuration out of the box. You are free to get started developing! However, you may wish to review the /web/sites/default/settings.php file and its documentation. It contains several options that you may wish to change according to your application.

You may also want to configure a few additional components of Drupal, such as:

Cache
Database
Session

Web Server Configuration

Pretty URLs

Apache

Drupal includes a public/.htaccess file that is used to provide URLs without the index.php front controller in the path. Before serving Drupal with Apache, be sure to enable the mod_rewrite module so the .htaccess file will be honoured by the server.

In Drupal 8, 'Clean URLs' are enabled by default and can't be disabled.

Nginx

If you are using Nginx, the ngx_http_rewrite_module module is required as Drupal 8 uses it for clean URLs.

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