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 (25 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Customer Feedback
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Virtualizing an environment


When we first began with this lesson, we mentioned the various ways to set up a local development environment. Depending on the size of your organization or team, having a repeatable and configured method for starting each Drupal project cuts down on having to manually install tools and dependencies. A VM also eliminates issues with something working locally, but not working on a remote server.

Using Drupal VM as a web starter

Depending on your skill level, it may make sense to create your own web starter by packaging and configuring Vagrant, VirtualBox, PHP, MySQL, and the list goes on. However, if some of those terms seem foreign to you, I would recommend the well-documented and easy-to-use Drupal VM (http://www.drupalvm.com):

Drupal VM is a virtual machine for local Drupal development, built with Vagrant and Ansible, that can be installed and run on Mac, Windows, or Linux. This package allows a consistent development experience with a robust set of tools already installed, including Composer, Drush, and Drupal Console.

Drupal VM was created and is maintained by Jeff Geerling. It is by far the best option for working with a Drupal-based web project and, while the steps involved to install it are clearly spelled out in the documentation, I would recommend starting with the Quick Start Guide available at https://github.com/geerlingguy/drupal-vm#quick-start-guide.

It is worth taking the time to learn how to work with a virtualized environment that can be configured and customized to work with any requirements your next Drupal project may have.

If at any point you experience any issues, the Drupal VM repository issue queue (https://github.com/geerlingguy/drupal-vm/issues)--is available to post questions for assistance.