Local Development Guide

Goals

The purpose of this guide is to assist you with creating and installing a new Drupal application on your local machine for the purpose of development.

Installing Drupal using the following instructions will give you a starting point for a website that can be deployed to a production environment. The intended audience for this guide is a developer.

Prerequisites

• You should be comfortable using a command-line terminal. See Moving Around the Command Line video tutorial.
• Sufficient system privileges to download and install new software.

Local development with DDEV

The Drupal community recommends using DDEV, a free, cross-platform local development solution. Other local development environment solutions exist.

Follow these instructions to install Drupal using DDEV for local development.

Log In

After installation, launch your new Drupal site and log in.

ddev launch

You can also generate a one-time login link for the administrator account (user id #1).

ddev drush user:login

If necessary, execute ddev describe to view the URL of your site. Copy and paste that URL into your web browser to visit it.

Next steps

What now?

Learn how you can begin to extend and customize your new Drupal application. Visit the Drupal User Guide and read the following chapters:

• Chapter 4. Basic Site Configuration
• Chapter 5. Basic Page Management
• Chapter 6. Setting Up Content Structure

Appendix

We chose to use DDEV for this local development guide because it met the following criteria:

1. Must be free and open source, without tying users into a proprietary product or service.
2. Must be well maintained, with long term support.
3. Must follow Drupal best practices.
4. Must be compatible with MacOS, Windows, and Linux.

5. Must be as simple as possible

   1. Fewest pre-requisites
   2. Fewest manual steps

To suggest a different local development solution, please create an issue in the Official Docs issue queue.