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So the first thing we need to do is get a Drupal 8 installation functional so that we
can begin to work through the examples. So we are going to use Acquia Dev Desktop for
this. This is an application that we have used in the past to set up a full Drupal environment
along with the complete AMP stack. That's Apache, MySQL, PHP.
If you decide to go this route as well, there are some introductory videos at the very beginning
of the full list of videos on this site that walk you through how to install Acquia Dev
Desktop on Windows or Mac. So we're not going to go through that here. We will go through
the process of importing a site but for more detail about this process, you can also look
at some of those introductory videos.
So I already have Acquia Dev Desktop open and here in the background is the Drupal 8
Snapshot inside of the Drupal 8 Development Prep Resource Pack. So if you haven't downloaded
this already, you can get it off of build a module dot com slash resource dash pack.
Inside of this Snapshot, if we expand it, we are going to see a folder called drupal
and this is a full Drupal 8 install, and then we also have this About this version of Drupal
8 text file. If you open it, it will give you a little bit of information about when
the Snapshot was taken, the SHA which is the hash that you can use to get this exact version
from Git if you pull it from the Git repository, and some information on how to get this version
of Drupal through Git.
Now, it's likely that most of the work that we do in this Drupal 8 installation is not
going to be portable to the version of Drupal 8 that eventually gets released, and that's
okay because we are just doing some examples. But if you find yourself wanting to build
out a full site or work on some modules that may be useful for you in the future, you may
want to download the latest version of Drupal and work on that.
By working on the Snapshot of 8, we'll get around any frustration that might occur from
inconsistencies with the videos where you won't be able to make progress because of
differences between this version and whatever the latest version of Drupal 8 is.
Okay. I'm going to exit out of this. So with Dev Desktop, we can install Drupal anywhere
on our hard drive. So we're going to go ahead and leave it in this Drupal 8 Snapshot Drupal
directory.
So to import the Drupal 8 installation, we need to go to Settings and then we need to
go to Sites in the tabs, and then we need to click on Import. Here, we need to Browse
to the file path where our Drupal directory is. So I'll go to the Resource Pack. I'll
open up the Snapshot and I'll open up the drupal folder and then we'll click Open.
This is a fresh installation so we need to add a new database. So we'll select Create
new database. And for the database name, we'll put drupal8devprep.
To make it easier to identify this site in our browser, let's go ahead and add a Subdomain.
We'll enter d8devprep and click Import. This will open up a browser to begin the installation
process. We'll go ahead and select the language, English, and click Save and continue. We'll
leave it at the Standard installation profile for now and click Save and continue.
The Database name and the Database username are both pre-filled and we can just go ahead
and click Save and continue from here. And now, we'll install Drupal and it will take
just a few seconds.
I'm going to fill these out real quick. Okay. So I entered Drupal 8 Dev Prep for the Site
name, and I entered my email address. Feel free to put whatever for yours. I'm creating
a user called admin but again you can create whatever you'd like for this as well, and
filled out the email address and password for the admin account.
I set this to United States for the Default country and I'm going to uncheck the Check
for updates automatically. We know that we don't want to upgrade our Drupal 8 installation
for this particular install. So I'll click Save and continue.
Okay. Looks like everything went okay. Let's click Visit your new site.
So this is the way that Drupal 8 should look after you install it. Now, we're not going
to go through many of the interface changes in this series. We're going to save that for
a site building series later on. But if you've used Drupal before, this should look pretty
familiar to you. We have a new toolbar across the top and you see some editing icons here
as we hover over various bits.