Week 4: Configure Your Environment for Theme Development

This is Week 4 of the 7-week course Hands-On: Theming. Get started with Drupal theming in 1 hour a week for 7 weeks. Based on our popular Drupal Theming Workshop featured at DrupalCon.

Time to complete: About 1 hour

This week you will configure your local environment for theme development. Go through each tutorial and then apply what you've learned in the final hands-on exercise. Be sure to complete the last tutorial listed (Exercise: Configure Your Environment for Theme Development) before you move on to Week 5: Override the Main Page Template.

Goal

  1. Understand the use cases and benefits of configuring local settings for theme development
  2. Complete Exercise: Configure Your Environment for Theme Development:
    • Configure Drupal settings on a per-environment basis
    • Disable caching via local settings changes
    • Enable Twig debugging mode via local settings changes

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You can also purchase the Practical Drupal Theming course on Thinkific. The course material is the same, but you can access the content without a Drupalize.Me membership and you will own the course forever.

Tutorial

Configure Your Environment for Theme Development

Theming, Drupal 9, Drupal 8, Drupal 10
More information

Making Drupal fast by default implies having caching layers and CSS and JavaScript aggregation utilities enabled out-of-the-box. As a theme developer this can be annoying, because you must clear these various caches in order to preview any changes. In addition, inspecting variables with debugging tools often produces PHP errors. We'll make some recommendations for PHP settings on your local environment that can prevent these errors from happening so often.

By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to:

Tutorial

Exercise: Configure Your Environment for Theme Development

Theming, Drupal 8, Drupal 9, Drupal 10
More information

Drupal has a few handy settings you can tweak to make developing themes a little more intuitive and a lot more awesome. This includes disabling some of the caching that Drupal does so you don't need to clear the cache as frequently. We'll also turn off CSS and JS aggregation in a settings file (overriding anything set on the Performance configuration form) so you can see your changes to .js and .css files with just a page refresh.