A document root is the main folder that our host entry will point to. In the case of Drupal, this will be the extracted root folder of Drupal itself. Generally, it is a best practice to maintain some sort of folder structure that is easy to manage and that can contain multiple websites.

For the sake of demonstration, we will create a Sites folder and then copy the compressed Drupal files to our new folder and extract the contents, as shown in the following image:

A host entry represents our website, which, in this case, is our Drupal 8 instance. Hosts always contain a server name that equates to the URL we will use to navigate to Drupal within our browser.

Begin by opening MAMP PRO and clicking on the Hosts tab. To add a new host entry, we can click on the plus icon at the bottom of the Server Name column, as shown in the following image:

By default, this will add a new host entry that will require us to configure with three very important pieces of information:

The General settings for our new host entry should look as shown in the following image:

We can now apply our changes by clicking on the Save button and then clicking on the Yes button when prompted to have MAMP PRO restart the servers.

MAMP PRO also installs a free software tool written in PHP for the sole purpose of managing MySQL databases. phpMyAdmin allows us to perform a multitude of tasks from browsing tables, views, fields, and indexes to exporting and importing database backups and much more.

If we switch back over to MAMP PRO, we can locate the MySQL tab and click on the phpMyAdmin link located in the Administer MySQL with region, as shown in the following image:

We should now be presented with phpMyAdmin within our browser. Currently, we are interested in creating a new database. We will revisit phpMyAdmin a little later to learn how to back up and restore our database. The following are the steps to create a database:

We have now created our first MySQL database, which we will use when configuring Drupal 8 in the next step.

The installation process will prompt us to choose a language that we want Drupal 8 to be installed in. This language will control how the Admin area appears, and in many cases, the default of English is acceptable. We will need to click on the Save and continue button to proceed to the next step, as shown in the following image:

Our next step is to choose an installation profile. We can think of this as Drupal's way of preconfiguring items for us that will make our job easier when developing. By default, we can leave the Standard profile selected, but if we choose to configure Drupal ourselves, we can always choose Minimal. Click on the Save and continue button to proceed to the next step, as shown in the following image:

The next screen allows us to review any requirements that Drupal needs or recommends for optimal performance. From here, we can see web server information, PHP version, memory limits, and more:

The requirements review can also alert us to any configuration settings that will allow Drupal to perform better. In our example, we forgot to enable OPcode caching, which allows PHP to compile down to bytecode. Without going into the details of caching, we can easily enable this feature in MAMP PRO.

Begin by opening up the MAMP PRO console and clicking on the PHP tab. Next, we will want to select OPcache from the Cache module to speed up PHP execution dropdown, as shown in the following image:

Click on the Save button and then allow MAMP PRO to restart servers if prompted. Now, we can refresh our Drupal install in the browser, and we will be taken to the next step in the installation process.

Database configuration can sometimes be a tricky part of installing Drupal for the first time. This is generally due to selecting the incorrect database type, wrong database name, or password, or by not specifying the correct host or port number.

The settings we will want to use are as follows:

With these settings, we can click on the Save and continue button to proceed.

If this is successful, we can see the Installing Drupal screen and watch as Drupal installs the various modules and configurations. This process may take a few minutes. If this process fails in any way, please go back and review the previous steps to make sure that they match what we have used.

Before we can wrap up our Drupal 8 installation, we need to configure our site by inputting various settings for site information, site maintenance account, regional settings, and update notifications. Let's proceed now by entering our Site Information.

The site information consists of the following:

Next, we will want to set up the site maintenance account. This is the primary account used to manage Drupal to perform such tasks as updating the core instance, module updates, and any development that needs user 1 permissions.

The site maintenance account information consists of the following:

Regional settings consist of default country and default time zone. These are often neglected and left with their defaults. The defaults are not recommended, as they are important in the development and design of Drupal 8 websites, specifically, when it comes to dates and how they are used to capture data and display dates back to the end user.

For our specific installation, choose the country and time zone for our region.

At last, we have come to our final set of configurations. Update notifications should always be left-checked unless we have no reason to receive security updates to Drupal core or module updates. By default, they should be checked. Click on Save and continue to finalize the configuration and installation of Drupal 8.

Drupal installation is now complete, and we should see the home page of our new website. Say "hello" to Drupal 8.

One of the first things to point out is that the files and folder structure of Drupal 8 have changed from its predecessor Drupal 7. The first change is that everything that Drupal 8 needs to run is contained within the new core folder. No longer is there any confusion of having the modules and themes folders contained within a sites folder and having to ask "did I place my files in the correct location?".

The core folder consists of miscellaneous files needed by Drupal to bootstrap the content management system as well as the following folders:

While a lot of functionality, which was generally contained in a contributed module, has been moved into the core instance of Drupal 8, you will still find yourself needing to extend Drupal. Previously, you would locate a contributed module, download it, and then extract its contents into your sites/all/modules folder so that Drupal could then use it.

Contributed and custom modules are now placed into the modules folder, which is no longer contained inside your sites folder.

Best practices are to create a few subdirectories inside the modules folder for contributed modules—the modules built by third parties that we will use to extend your project, such as contrib, and custom, for the modules that we create on a per project basis. We will also occasionally find ourselves with a features folder if we plan to use the Features module to break out functionality that needs to be managed in code for purposes of migrating it easily to development, staging, and production instances of our website.

We are all familiar with the sites folder in Drupal 7. However, in Drupal 8, the sites folder only contains our Drupal instance configuration and files.

Finally, we have the themes folder. So, why don't we see the default themes that Drupal generally ships with inside this folder? That is because Drupal's default themes now are contained within the core folder. Finally, we will actually use the themes folder to place our custom or contributed themes inside it for use by Drupal.

We will be exploring the themes folder in more detail in later chapters as we begin creating custom themes.

One little gotcha when using phpMyAdmin is making sure that when we create our database export, we ensure that the SQL also drops any tables before trying to recreate them when we do the import later.

We can create our database export by following these steps:

At this point, we have a new file named drupal8.sql, which contains a backup of our database. Next, we will use this file we just created to restore our database.