Developing Drupal sites requires being able to run a copy of your application locally, and knowing how to keep the core software up-to-date with the latest releases.
This course covers the installation and configuration of DDEV, the use of Composer and Drush for managing Drupal installations, and the step-by-step process for updating Drupal core from one minor version (10.2) to another (10.3).
Key topics
- Use DDEV to create a local development environment for Drupal
- Instructions to install Drupal within the DDEV environment
- Drupal's version numbering scheme and the differences between major, minor, and patch releases
- The process for updating Drupal core from one minor version to another
- Instructions on how to use Composer and Drush to manage and update Drupal
- Best practices for updates
Installing Drupal using the instructions in this tutorial will give you a working Drupal site that can be used for learning, or real-world project development.
Before you can work on a Drupal site locally (on your computer), you'll need to set up a local development environment. This includes all the system requirements like PHP and a web server, that Drupal needs in order to run. Our favorite way to accomplish this is using DDEV.
In this tutorial we'll learn:
- How to install and configure DDEV for use with a Drupal project.
- How to use DDEV's integrated Composer to download Drupal and Drush.
- How to install Drupal inside DDEV so you can access the site and start doing development.
By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to set up a local development environment for learning Drupal or working on a new Drupal project.
Drupal's development has a regular release cycle consisting of major, minor, and patch releases. Drupal releases use semantic versioning for its version numbers. Since we're committed to making sure our tutorials are kept up-to-date with the latest and greatest version of Drupal we figured it would be a good idea if you knew how to keep your Drupal site up-to-date with the latest "point" releases as well.
This tutorial will cover:
- How to determine the type of update
- The standard update procedure
- Update Drupal using Drush
- Update Drupal using Composer
This tutorial won't cover:
- How to perform a major version Drupal upgrade, for example, from Drupal 6 or 7 to the latest version of Drupal. For that, see our guide, Learn to Migrate to Drupal.
