This chapter will kick off with an introduction to installing a Drupal 8 site. We will walk through Drupal's interactive installer. We will cover installing Drupal using a command-line tool called Drush. Drupal provides two installation types: standard and minimal. Throughout this book, we will use the standard installation.
Once we have installed our Drupal 8 site, we will cover the basics of extending Drupal. We will discuss using distributions and installing contributed projects, such as modules and themes. We will also include uninstalling modules, as the process for uninstalling modules has changed in Drupal 8.
This book will involve a hands-on example for working with Drupal 8, and this chapter will provide information on setting up a local development environment. This chapter will also provide recipes on how to set up a Multisite installation in Drupal 8 and run the available test suites.
Before we get started, you should install Composer. Composer is the de facto package management tool for PHP. In case you are unfamiliar with Composer, it is just like using Gems for Ruby, npm for Node.js, and Bower for frontend libraries. Go to the Composer documentation to learn how to install Composer globally on your system:
- Linux / Unix / macOS: https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md#installation-linux-unix-osx
- Windows: https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md#installation-windows
