Installing Drupal programmatically (Mac)

0.   Overview

This is a quick guide on how to install Drupal programmatically on a Mac. The targeted audience is people who want to become familiar with Drupal, or need to get up to speed as quickly as possible. The steps below should get you up and running in no time.

1.   Install Homebrew

(if you don’t already have it on your system)

1. Dependencies: Xcode (from the App Store, in case you don’t already have it installed)
2. In Terminal type:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

2.   Install Composer

1. Update Homebrew: in Terminal:

   brew update

2. Install PHP: in Terminal:

   brew install php

3. Install Composer: inTerminal:

   brew install composer.

   To test installation, run:

   composer -v

3.   Local development with DDEV

1. Dependencies: Docker (from: hub.docker.com)
2. In Terminal, execute:

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/drud/ddev/master/scripts/install_ddev.sh | bash

1. Use this command to install Drupal, via Composer:

# Replace my-site-name!export SITE_NAME=my-site-namecomposer create-project drupal/recommended-project $SITE_NAMEcd $SITE_NAME

If everything went well, you should see this at the end:

This created a new directory and populated it with Drupal and its dependencies.

1. Run the following command (assumes DDEV):

ddev config --docroot web --project-name $SITE_NAME --project-type drupal9

This will configure your new Drupal application to work with DDEV and will store the generated configuration in a new .ddev subdirectory.

1. Next, start the DDEV container:

ddev start

You now have a web server and a database configured and running. To verify in your browser, go here. You should see this:

4.   Install Drupal

At this point you must install Drupal which will populates your Drupal app’s new database. Run this, and replace the “my-pasword” with a password of your choice. This will be for the “user 1” or “admin” account.

ddev exec drush site-install --account-name=admin --account-pass=my-password

Before the install begins, it will prompt you:

Choose “y.” The install will commence. After the installation is finished, run

ddev describe

to see the status of your Drupal site, the Project Information, the URLs, the DB credentials and other installed services, as well as the status of the DDEV Router and ssh-auth. For example, this is how it shows on my machine:

Go ahead and log in, using the user and password provided above:

5.   Next steps

Now that you’re up and running, you can start configuring your site. Things like site configuration, page management, setting up content structure, managing user accounts, as well as other advanced topics are explained here. Lastly, if your organization needs help setting up any of these advanced Drupal topics, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’d love to help you get started.