Installation of Drupal core and contributed projects

Install and run Drupal locally in no time.

Fast local installation

This is perfect to evaluate and develop with Drupal locally. A 5 minutes tops installation. You should have PHP 8.1 and Composer installed.

Require the Drupal project

composer create-project drupal/recommended-project my-site

Install Drupal

cd my-site

There are 2 scripts: install and quick-start.

quick-start is a wrapper around install with some default shortcuts like running a local PHP server, opening the browser and logging you in as an admin.

Standard installation

Installation with SQLite database and the standard profile. This is perfect to test a vanilla Drupal installation and install a few modules to review. Also this setup is the ideal candidate to debug a Drupal project issue in isolation and contribute.

php web/core/scripts/drupal install standard

Installation with translated demo content

Installation with the the Demo Umami profile. It comes with some demo content, translations and a few other modules enabled. Use this if you want to evaluate a more complete set of Drupal features.

php web/core/scripts/drupal install demo_umami

Run it with the PHP built-in server

You can skip this if you used the quick-start script.

cd web
php -S 127.0.0.1:8888

More details about requiring a specific version, using Drush and development modules A minimal Drupal local development environment (part 1) (opens in a new tab)
Install another database than SQLite, multiple PHP versions, Solr, a mail catcher and review common pitfalls A minimal Drupal local development environment (part 2) (opens in a new tab)

Install contributed projects

Once you found a module or theme to install, you can use Composer.

composer require drupal/[project_name]

Then enable the project with the UI or Drush.

Enable a project with the UI

Modules /admin/modules
Themes /admin/appearance

Enable a project with Drush

Module

drush en [module_name]

Theme

drush then [theme_name]

Run Drupal with DDEV or Lando

To get the same setup as production.

Use DDEV for local environments (opens in a new tab) - Lullabot

A note about Docker on macOS

Docker for Mac is a great tool to run containers on your Mac. However, it is slow. Make sure to read this article: Docker on MacOS is slow and how to fix it (opens in a new tab)

Or try this alternative: OrbStack (opens in a new tab)

When to use Drupal?Update Drupal core and contributed projects