Tutorial: Vagrant Drupal 8 Development

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In this tutorial, you'll learn how to set up a local Drupal 8 development environment using the Vagrant Drupal Development (VDD) contributed module, Chef, Vagrant, and VirtualBox.

Warning - To use VDD with Drupal 8 you need to use the 8.x-1.x-dev version until a new release is created (after September 10, 2015).

Vagrant Drupal Development (VDD) is a ready-to-use development environment contained in a virtual machine. Why use it? It provides a standard hosting setup for developing with Drupal. This can get you up and running quickly, without knowing anything about server administration.

The VDD module uses Chef, a configuration management tool that helps automate your infrastructure, and Virtualbox server virtualization software. VDD uses Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin, a Linux distribution, as a base. LTS is an acronym for Long Term Support. Version 12.04 was released in 2012 and has maintenance support until 2017. There is an issue open for upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, although 2017 is a ways off.

One of the best things about the VDD module is that it shares a directory on your local machine with the virtual machine (VM) you use to run Drupal. This allows you to use all of your local development tools, while keeping all the server configuration in the VM!

Getting started

We're going to set up a Drupal 8 environment. Vagrant Drupal Development requires Virtualbox and Vagrant, if you don't have these installed, follow the steps below.

Installing Virtualbox:

Navigate to https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and grab a copy of the installer for your OS/Platform, and install it!

Installing Vagrant:

Make sure you followed the step above and installed Virtualbox. Otherwise, you won't be able to install Vagrant. Navigate to http://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html and, again, grab a copy of the installer for your OS/Platform, and install it!

If you previously had Virtualbox installed, make sure to back up your current VMs before proceeding with this tutorial.

Clone the VDD repo in to your home directory (~/):

git clone --branch 8.x-1.x http://git.drupal.org/project/vdd.git
cd vdd

Drupal 8 now requires PHP 5.5.9, and as such, the base VDD module will require applying a patch to get Drupal 8 running.

VDD automatically creates drush aliases for each site in the config.json file at


~/vdd/consig.json


By default, it defines a Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 alias. You can also set the username, email, and password for your Drupal install:

"vdd": {
  "sites": {
    "drupal8": {
      "account_name": "root",
      "account_pass": "root",
      "account_mail": "[email protected]",
      "site_name": "Drupal 8",
      "site_mail": "[email protected]",
      "vhost": {
        "document_root": "drupal8",
        "url": "drupal8.dev",
        "alias": ["www.drupal8.dev"]
      }
    },
    "drupal7": {
      "account_name": "root",
      "account_pass": "root",
      "account_mail": "[email protected]",
      "site_name": "Drupal 7",
      "site_mail": "[email protected]",
      "vhost": {
        "document_root": "drupal7",
        "url": "drupal7.dev",
        "alias": ["www.drupal7.dev"]
      }
    }
  }
}

We can now start provisioning our VM. Once you type the following, go and grab a snack. It takes some time!


vagrant up


Once this is complete, you'll see the following in the terminal:

==> default: =============================================================
==> default: Install finished! Visit http://192.168.44.44 in your browser.
==> default: =============================================================

Visiting http://192.168.44.44 presents you with further instructions. I'll quickly add the bare-bones here so we can move along. But I urge you to visit this link and read more, particularly if you're interested in a Drupal 6 or 7 development environment.

We are going to add a custom entry to our hosts files, which controls your local system's DNS.

In Linux, edit the following file as an administrator in your text editor of choice:


/etc/hosts


In OS X, edit the following file as an administrator in your text editor of choice:


/private/etc/hosts


In Windows, edit the following file as an administrator in your text editor of choice:


C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts


I'm only going to add an entry for Drupal 8 here, as the VDD summary page noted above (http://192.168.44.44) describes the entries you may wish to add for other Drupal versions.

192.168.44.44 drupal8.dev
192.168.44.44 www.drupal8.dev

Now we want to grab the latest Drupal 8, either using git, or drush. Make sure to use the directory name Drupal 8 to save us from editing apache config:

cd ~/vdd/data/drupal8
git clone --branch 8.0.x http://git.drupal.org/project/drupal.git .

By default, VDD performance can be slow, depending on your system, as it uses shared folders to share a directory on your host system with your virtual machine.

To speed this up, if you're running OS X or Linux, you can use: NFS

If your host system is Debian or Ubuntu (OS X users can skip this step):


apt-get install nfs-kernel-server


Now edit the "synced_folders" section of your config.json file, setting the "type" property from "default" to "nfs":

"synced_folders": [
    {
      "host_path": "data/",
      "guest_path": "/var/www",
      "type": "nfs"
    }
  ],

Windows users can use SMB:

"synced_folders": [
    {
      "host_path": "data/",
      "guest_path": "/var/www",
      "type": "smb"
    }
  ],

Now issue the following command to reload your VM configuration, from the VDD root directory on your host system:


vagrant reload


To install Drupal 8 on your new virtual machine :


vagrant ssh


The drush command 'si' installs your new Drupal site using the credentials specified in the config.json, based on the alias you pass. Since we're installing Drupal 8:

cd ~/sites/drupal8
drush @drupal8 si standard -y

You should now be able to navigate to drupal8.dev or www.drupal8.dev in your web browser, and log in with the credentials you specified in your config.json file.

You can start working on Drupal 8 core, on your local system, at the following location:


~/vdd/data/drupal8


Why not start with Writing a Hello World Module?

If you would like to use mysql from the command line, you'll want to first ssh to your VM. From the VDD root directory on your host system:

vagrant ssh
cd ~/sites/drupal8

Then for mysql directly (you'll be prompted to type in the password: "root"):


mysql -u root -p drupal8


Or using drush sql-cli:


drush sql-cli


Happy coding everyone!