My Drupal 8 test drive - it's still early days
For some reason, I know not what - perhaps I was whipped away by a flight of fancy, or just wanted to get my hands on helios for Drupal 8 - because it looks fabulous, I’ve decided to take Drupal 8 for a test drive.
First steps: get Drupal 8
The first step is to get Drupal 8 installed on my local machine.
Step 1 download and extract, as per Drupal 7. So I’ve downloaded the latest beta release (drupal-8.0.0-beta7.tar.gz), unzipped it on my local machine and identified a maze of documentation pages, comments, corrections and advice; but I figure here is as good a place as any to begin. Ooh, they have steps.
Step 2 created database - I created using phpmyadmin, as that’s how I’d normally do it. However Drupal 8 has the power to create databases, if your database user has the power (ie. privileges) to do so.
Step 3 - the first difference - as well as creating a settings.php from default.settings.php, Drupal 8 has another configuration file it’s necessary to copy and give permissions on, this is default.services.yml and can be found in sites/default alongside default.settings.php. So I copy them, rename them and chmod them in my terminal. It is important that you leave the original files in place too, hence the 'copy' bit, I don’t just rename them.
As with Drupal 7, I also need to give permissions to create a 'files' directory
chmod a+w default/
Clear the caches
I go to clear my caches and Drush doesn't work! I’ll need another version ...
Step 4 - Running the installation script - which according to the documentation should be as drupal 7 - I would but install.php is not there - it’s in mysitename/core/install.php
and I'll need permissions on install.php so
chmod 775
settings.php
But then I remembered I needed to make my normal changes to settings.php for my localhost:
'default' => array ( 'default' => array ( 'database' => ‘myDb', 'username' => ‘myUser', 'password' => ‘myPW', 'host' => '127.0.0.1', 'port' => '', 'driver' => 'mysql', 'prefix' => '', ), ),
But I don’t make the normal ‘cookie’ change, I’ll wait and see.
Still nothing works - so chmod the whole drupal8 file system? ...
Still no luck ... restart my xxamp for the millionth time today ...
Success - sort of
You do need to go to your site/core/install.php explicitly
Okay - as usual, despite giving the right/write permissions on my file system, the installer has not been able to create sites/default/files - so far so normal, I create it myself.
Also as usual settings.php is showing as unwritable - although I already did this, I’m guessing the installer resets it to protected and then complains about it. So I go fix them, and check permissions on my new ‘files’ directory whilst I’m there.
Normal installation, slightly different order - AND I’M IN AND IT’S BEAUTIFUL (well actually it's a bit Wordpress for my taste, but the euphoria has got to me) - but then I haven’t touched anything yet ... and I think there might be a few permissions I need to go back and fix.
For a later version test drive of Drupal 8 see our expert's blog: Taking Drupal 8 for a Spin