Installing Drupal

You wouldn't think it would be this complicated to install, but...

I had been working through https://www.drupal.org/documentation/the-essentials-7, and was struggling to create a drupal project on my local machine. I tried following https://www.drupal.org/docs/getting-started/installing-drupal, but was hoping to be able to start a site that wasn’t the quick-start demo site Drupal provides. It took a bit of poking around, googling error messages, and guesswork, but I managed to assemble this set of instructions that reliably allows me to set up a new Drupal project that’s persistent and independent from other projects on my machine. This is on a Mac Mini running Sonoma 14.3.

• I understand you need to have PHP <= 8.1 installed, as well as Composer, so best to check that before proceeding: php --version, composer --version
• cd <directory-in-which-you-want-your-project-to-live>
• composer create-project drupal/recommended-project <some-directory>
  • This command creates a directory called <some-directory>, downloads some necessary files, and puts them in that directory
• cd <some-directory>
• php web/core/scripts/drupal install, selecting standard (or, optionally, minimal - you do you) when prompted
• cd web (without moving to this directory, you’ll get an error message along the lines of In Connection.php line 124: SQLSTATE[HY000] [14] unable to open database file when you try to run the next command)
• php core/scripts/drupal server
  • If the server hangs after a little while using the above command, you can try running php -S 127.0.0.1:8888 .ht.router.php instead, as suggested here.
• now there’s a server running serving your site, and you can visit it in the browser at http://127.0.0.1:8888
• when you want to stop the server, Ctrl-C

If you want to start another project, follow the same steps, specifying a different directory for the composer create-project command. To switch back to the first project, navigate to <some-directory>/web and run php core/scripts/drupal server. Changes made on both projects should be independent and persistent.