Book Image

Mastering Drupal 8

By : Sean Montague, Chaz Chumley, William Hurley
Book Image

Mastering Drupal 8

By: Sean Montague, Chaz Chumley, William Hurley

Overview of this book

Drupal is an open source content management system trusted by governments and organizations around the globe to run their websites. It brings with it extensive content authoring tools, reliable performance, and a proven track record of security. The community of more than 1,000,000 developers, designers, editors, and others have developed and maintained a wealth of modules, themes, and other add-ons to help you build a dynamic web experience. Drupal 8 is the latest release of the Drupal built on the Symfony2 framework. This is the largest change to the Drupal project in its history. The entire API of Drupal has been rebuilt using Symfony and everything from the administrative UI to themes to custom module development has been affected. This book will cover everything you need to plan and build a complete website using Drupal 8. It will provide a clear and concise walkthrough of the more than 200 new features and improvements introduced in Drupal core. In this book, you will learn advanced site building techniques, create and modify themes using Twig, create custom modules using the new Drupal API, explore the new REST and Multilingual functionality, import, and export Configuration, and learn how to migrate from earlier versions of Drupal.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Developer Workflow

In order to fully take advantage of Drupal 8, it helps to have an established developer workflow. This can range from having a local web server to using a fully integrated, virtualized AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack that mimics the development, staging, and production servers that one may need to deploy Drupal. It also helps to establish a set of best practices to follow when it comes to installing, managing, and working with Drupal 8 on a project-by-project basis. While there are various tools to choose from, we will look at some of the most common ones available to us, including Composer, Drush, DrupalConsole, and Git.

The deeper we dive into mastering Drupal 8, the more vital it becomes to learn command-line interfaces, such as Composer, Drush, Git, and Drupal Console. These require the use of a Terminal window and a level of comfort when working with the command line. While we will not be covering the basics of Windows or Unix shell, we will explain what each command does and how each tool speeds up our developer workflow.

In this chapter, we will be covering the basics of how to use each of these tools to install, extend, and manage a typical Drupal 8 developer workflow, including the following:

  • Deciding on a local AMP stack
  • The role of Composer
  • Speeding up tasks using Drush
  • A quick look at Drupal Console
  • Using Git to manage source code
  • Virtualizing an environment