As mentioned earlier, to install Drupal, you will need to have access to a database server (or the ability to create one) and an existing database (or the ability to create one). This process will depend on your environment setup.

If you are working with a hosting provider, there is more than likely a web-based control panel. This should allow you to create databases and users. Refer to your hosting provider's documentation for more information on this topic.

If you are using phpMyAdmin (https://www.phpmyadmin.net/) on your server, often installed by MAMP, WAMP, and XAMPP, and have root access, you can create your databases and users by following these steps:

If you do not have a user interface but have a command-line access, you can set up your database and user using the MySQL command line. These instructions can be found in the core/INSTALL.mysql.txt file. From the command line of your site, perform the following:

$ mysql -u username -p

$ CREATE DATABASE my_database CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

$ CREATE USER username@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

$ GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES ON databasename.* TO 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Drupal, like other content management systems, allows you to prefix its database tables from the database set-up form. This prefix will be placed before table names to help make them unique. Although it is not recommended, this would allow multiple installations to share one database. Utilizing table prefixes can, however, provide some level of security through obscurity since the tables will not be their default names:

You may also install Drupal using the PHP command-line tool, Drush. Drush is a command-line tool created by the Drupal community and must be installed if you wish to use it. Drush is covered in Chapter 13, The Drupal CLI.

The pm-download command will download packages from Drupal.org. The site-install command will allow you to specify an installation profile and other options to install a Drupal site. The installation steps in this recipe could be run through Drush, as follows:

$ cd /path/to/web$ drush pm-download drupal-8 drupal8$ cd drupal8$ drush site-install standard -locale=en-US --account-name=admin --account-pass=admin [email protected] -db-url=mysql://user:pass@localhost/database

We used Drush to download the latest Drupal 8 and place it in a folder named drupal8. Then, the site-install command instructs Drush to use the standard install profile, configure the maintenance account, and provide a database URI string so that Drupal can connect to its database.

You can download Drupal using Composer, the de facto PHP package manager. The preferred method is to use the Drupal Composer project template provided by the community.

To build your Drupal 8 site, run the following commands:

$ cd /path/to/document/root$ composer create-project drupal-composer/drupal-project drupal8 --stability dev

Wait for the commands to finish--it may take some time, as it downloads all the required dependencies. You can feel free to grab a coffee (the first time takes a while; it primes caches. Have faith, it will be much faster the next time.)

When finished, you will find a different directory structure inside your drupal8 directory. The vendor directory contains all third-party PHP libraries, and the web directory contains your Drupal 8 site. You will need to modify your web server to use the web directory as the new docroot within your drupal8 directory.

The project and its details can be found at https://github.com/drupal-composer/drupal-project, along with its full documentation.

If you choose to disable the update options, you will have to check manually for module upgrades. While most upgrades are for bug fixes or features, some are for security updates. It is highly recommended that you subscribe to the Drupal security team's updates. These updates are available on Twitter at @drupalsecurity (https://twitter.com/drupalsecurity) or the feeds onhttps://www.drupal.org/security.