Introduction
Drupal is one of the most well-known PHP content management systems written available online.
It’s a very powerful tool accessible to everyone. This CMS (Content Management System) has a huge community and counts more than 32,000 modules that are easy to download and set-up from the official Drupal website: https://www.drupal.org .
Modules play a key part in Drupal by extending its functionality.
Over the years, Drupal has seen impressive gains in terms of speed and usability. It’s still not quite as easy to use as its rivals – Joomla and WordPress – but compared to Drupal 5, this latest version of Drupal is far easier to install, use and customize.
Today we will see how to install Drupal 8 on your computer – the latest version.
Requirements
Please note that in order to install and run a Drupal installation on your machine you will need to have a Web Server and DB Server running. In this tutorial we will use Apache as Web Server and MySQL Server; however you are free to use other Servers. In regards to database servers, Drupal also supports MariaDB, SQLite, PostgreeSQL and Microsoft SQL Server.
Download and Install Drupal 8
Once you have a Web Server and MySQL Server running on your machine you are ready to go.
First of all, download the latest version of Drupal on your PC from this URL: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal .
At the moment the latest version is 8.0.2 as shown in the image below:
Please note that from here we downloaded drupal-8.0.2.zip file.
Once you have downloaded the zip file on your machine, you need to decompress it under the htdocs folder (on some Web Servers this folder is called also “www”).
In our case, we extracted the content of the zip file in this path: C:\xampp\htdocs\drupal .
To check that everything is working correctly, you should be able to access to the Drupal installation page through the browser under the following URL: http://localhost/drupal/
The browser should show you this page:
If your browser is showing error page, double-check that your web server is running correctly and that you copied the Drupal folder in the right path.
Once you can see that screen, you can start installing the latest version of Drupal on your computer. Choose your preferred language and click on “Save and continue”.
The system should now ask you to select the type of installation you want to apply. As this is probably your first time setting-up a Drupal website on your machine we would suggest you select the Standard option and click on “Save and continue”. At this point the CMS will check if all requirements are met before allowing you to proceed with the installation. The system will check if you have a supported PHP version and web server, and that PHP has enough memory limit and it will check if database support is enabled. If it’s all good you can proceed on the next step, otherwise if you have any issue, Drupal will advise how to fix those.
Set up database
The next step is to set-up the database info that Drupal needs in order to create all the tables and data required to run the project. The screen should now show something like this:
What we need here is to create a new Database in our MySQL Server and then pass the information to Drupal through this form. You can create a new database instance through PHPMyAdmin or any MySQL Client. In our case we used HeidiSQL and created a database called drupal_test as shown in the image above.
Please note that in the Advance options you can change your default host “localhost”, the MySQL port number and add a prefix your tables.
Once you are happy with the settings click on “Save and continue”.
Now Drupal will start installing all the modules and creating all the tables that it needs, these procedure could take few mins, so just relax – this is where the magic happens!
Once the installation is completed, fill in the last form about the site configuration. In this form you will be asked to insert the site name, site email address and to create the admin account. After that is all done, your new Drupal website is now ready to be used.
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