Setting up a Local Environment
Do you have a Drupal website you need to style? Or maybe it uses a default layout and the result is not what you want?
Drupal splits the management of content and how it is presented on a page in a very precise way. You can have the same content presented with very different layouts.
The layer of Drupal that manages layout and style is called a theme. The aim of this book is to teach you what the theme layer is, how it works, and how to leverage it to style content the way you want.
To get started, you need an environment where you can do your work. You can choose between your local machine or some remote service; in both cases, you will need a way to run a PHP interpreter, a web server, and a database server.
You will also need a code editor that supports working on different kinds of files—such as PHP, CSS, JavaScript, and YAML—and that is advanced enough to help you navigate through the project, write new code, and debug existing code.
In this chapter, we’ll set up that environment.
We will cover the following topics:
- Installing the required software
- Installing the demo site
- Exploring the demo site
- Disabling production optimization
