Step by Step Guide how to Install Drupal 8

In our previous post you might have read about the uniqueness Drupal 8 has come up with and the enhanced capabilities it will deploy on your Drupal websites. In this post, we will give a detailed description on how can you install Drupal 8 and what are the pre-requisites for installation.

The following are pre-requisites of installing Drupal 8 on your server

Drupal 8 requires:

• PHP Version requirements: Php version 5.4.5 or greater than this
• Database requirements: SQLite 3.4.2 or greater, PostgreSQL 8.3 or greater, MySQ 5.0.15 or greater, MariaDB 5.1.4 or greater, Percona server 5.1.70
• Web Server requirement: A web server with PHP support i.e. Apache 2.0 or greater, Nginx 1.1 or greater

Along with these requisites, there are certain optional server requirements to install drupal 8 like:

• The mod_headers module and ability to use local .htaccess files will be required to serve gzip compressed CSS and JS files on Apache server.
• In order to use XML based services like RSS aggregation PHP‘s XML extension will be required. In most PHP installations, this is extension is enabled by default.
• The mod_rewrite module and the ability to use local .htaccess files will be required if you want to use Drupal’s “Clean URLs” feature.

Stepwise procedure for how to install drupal 8 on your system

Step 1.  Download and extract Drupal

The first step is downloading the latest Drupal release from the trusted website where the files will be present in .tar.gz and .zip formats. These .zip files can be easily extracted using compression tools. A new Drupal directory will be created, which will contain all the Drupal files and directories. After this, move the contents of this directory into your public HTML directory.

Step 2. Create Drupal database

As all the website information is stored in Drupal database, the Drupal installer will create a database for you. You need to take note of certain parameters while creating a database viz. username, password, hostname and password.

Step 3. Run install script

In order to run the install script you must point your browser to the base URL of your website. You will be lead through several screens to create a database, provide website settings, and to add site maintenance account. The install script will automatically create directories and certain files. Some of the hosting environments might require some manual steps, where install script will not proceed until certain issues are fixed. This will require you to perform some extra steps like:

• If auto-creation of file storage directory in the default location fails, you can make this work by changing permissions on sites/default directory. This will enable the web server to create a default directory. After the installation is finished, make sure you reset the permission as they were originally.

• Again, if auto-creation of settings.php and services.yml files fails you will have to create the files by yourself by using the template sites/default/default.settings.php or sites/default/default.services.yml respectively. After creating the file, be sure to reset the permissions on completion of installation

Step 4. Verify if the website is working or not

After the completion of install script step, you will be logged in with the website maintenance account. If one the “welcome” page, the default Drupal theme is working with certain errors, or is not displaying properly or there are certain page errors. If this is the case you will have to check your “Clean URLs”.

After this step is completed, you can change the file system path to store uploaded files in different location. Although, this is an optional step which is not required except if your website runs multiple Drupal installations or your website runs on number of web servers.

Step 5.   Set-up independent Cron maintenance tasks

After Drupal 8 is installed, you are allowed to configure the built-in cron feature to enable independent cron maintenance tasks. Tasks like performing root maintenance of database tables, retrieving feeds from other sites are some example of built-in cron maintenance tasks triggered by people visiting the website. While you can also set-up such independent tasks, which can be created by setting up automated process to cron the website. This creates a cron page whose URL requires a ‘cron key’ to protect access against unauthorized access. This is automatically generated during installation.

This was the installation process and system requirements that you need to follow to install Drupal 8. To read more about “What is new in Drupal 8?” you can visit our recent post.

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