Site Building

3.6. Downloading the Core Software Manually for Drupal 8, 9, and 10

Goal

Download the core software or a distribution manually. Skip this topic if you are downloading using some other method.

Steps

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  1. Go to https://www.drupal.org and navigate to Build > Download & Extend in the top-level menu.

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    Downloads page on Drupal.org

  2. If you want to download just the core software, click the Download Drupal zip or download tar.gz link, and save the file to your local machine.
  3. If you want to download a distribution, click the Distributions icon or link, choose a distribution from the list, click through to its project page. On the project page click the link to view the release notes for the latest release, and click the link to download a zip or tar.gz file to your local machine.
  4. Upload the downloaded file to your hosting account. Log in to the control panel and navigate to the HTML directory. Save the file there.
  5. Uncompress the tar.gz or zip file, which will create a new directory. If you do not have terminal access, or your hosting server is not running Linux, your hosting control panel’s file manager should provide a way to extract the files. If you have terminal access to your hosting server (running Linux), you can use a command like:

    tar -xzf drupal-9.0.7.tar.gz
  6. Delete the compressed file from the server, unless your unpacking method already deleted it.
  7. Rename the directory or reconfigure your web hosting, so that the directory name matches the directory your web hosting is configured to use for your site.

Expand your understanding

Once you have the software downloaded, you can install a temporary demo site (see Section 3.3, “Concept: Methods for Downloading and Installing the Core Software”) by running the following command from the top-level directory of the core software:

php core/scripts/drupal quick-start standard

The demo site will be installed, and your web browser should open to log in to the new site, which will only run as long as the PHP command is active. To learn more about this functionality, use its help command:

php core/scripts/drupal quick-start --help