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Installing Composer, Drush, and Drupal

In this section, we will install:

  • Composer at its current latest version, the package manager that will allow us to install PHP applications
  • The Islandora fork of the composer installer from drupal-composer/drupal-project, which will install, among other things:
    • Drush 10 at its latest version, the command-line PHP application for running tasks in Drupal
    • Drupal 9 at its latest version, the content management system Islandora uses for content modelling and front-end display

Composer 2.x

Download and install Composer

Composer provides PHP code that we can use to install it. After downloading and running the installer, we’re going to move the generated executable to a place in $PATH, removing its extension:

curl "https://getcomposer.org/installer" > composer-install.php
chmod +x composer-install.php
php composer-install.php
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Drush 10 and Drupal 9

Clone drupal-project and install it via Composer

Before we can fully install Drupal, we’re going to need to clone drupal-project and provision it using Composer. We’re going to install it into the /opt directory:

# Start by giving Drupal somewhere to live. The Drupal project is installed to
# an existing, empty folder.
sudo mkdir /opt/drupal
sudo chown www-data:www-data /opt/drupal
sudo chmod 775 /opt/drupal
# Change the ownership of default Apache directory so Composer can access it
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/
# Clone drupal-project and build it in our newly-created folder.
git clone https://github.com/drupal-composer/drupal-project.git
cd drupal-project
# Expect this to take a little while, as this is grabbing the entire
# requirements set for Drupal.
sudo -u www-data composer create-project drupal-composer/drupal-project:9.x-dev /opt/drupal --no-interaction

Make Drush accessible in $PATH

While it’s not required for Drush to be accessible in $PATH, not needing to type out the full path to it every time we need to use it is going to be incredibly convenient for our purposes. The rest of this guide will assume that we can simply run Drush from the command line when necessary without having to reference the full path.

sudo ln -s /opt/drupal/vendor/drush/drush/drush /usr/local/bin/drush

Make the new webroot accessible in Apache

Before we can proceed with the actual site installation, we’re going to need to make our new Drupal installation the default web-accessible location Apache serves up. This will include an appropriate ports.conf file, and replacing the default enabled site.

Notice

Out of the box, these files will contain support for SSL, which we will not be setting up in this guide (and therefore removing with these overwritten configurations), but which are absolutely indispensible to a production site. This guide does not recommend any particular SSL certificate authority or installation method, but you may find DigitalOcean's tutorial helpful.

/etc/apache2/ports.conf | root:root/644

Listen 80

Remove everything but the "Listen 80" line. You can leave the comments in if you want.

/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf | root:root/777

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName SERVER_NAME
  DocumentRoot "/opt/drupal/web"
  <Directory "/opt/drupal/web">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride all
    Require all granted
  </Directory>
  # Ensure some logging is in place.
  ErrorLog "/var/log/apache2/localhost_error.log"
  CustomLog "/var/log/apache2/localhost_access.log" combined
</VirtualHost>
  • SERVER_NAME: localhost
    • For a development environment hosted on your own machine or a VM, localhost should suffice. Realistically, this should be the domain or IP address the server will be accessed at.

Restart the Apache 2 service to apply these changes:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Prepare the PostgreSQL database

PostgreSQL roles are directly tied to users. We’re going to ensure a user is in place, create a role for them in PostgreSQL, and create a database for them that we can use to install Drupal.

# Run psql as the postgres user, the only user currently with any PostgreSQL
# access.
sudo -u postgres psql
# Then, run these commands within psql itself:
create database DRUPAL_DB encoding 'UTF8' LC_COLLATE = 'en_US.UTF-8' LC_CTYPE = 'en_US.UTF-8' TEMPLATE template0;
create user DRUPAL_DB_USER with encrypted password 'DRUPAL_DB_PASSWORD';
grant all privileges on database DRUPAL_DB to DRUPAL_DB_USER;
# Then, quit psql.
\q
  • DRUPAL_DB: drupal9
    • This will be used as the core database that Drupal is installed into
  • DRUPAL_DB_USER: drupal
    • Specifically, this is the user that will connect to the PostgreSQL database being created, not the user that will be logging into Drupal
  • DRUPAL_DB_PASSWORD: drupal
    • This should be a secure password; it’s recommended to use a password generator to create this such as the one provided by random.org

Run the Drupal installer with Drush

The standard Drupal installation method involves navigating to your site’s front page and navigating through a series of form steps, but we can fast-track this using Drush’s site-install command.

# Rather than defining the root directory in our Drush command, we're going to
# do this from the site root context.
cd /opt/drupal/web
drush -y site-install standard --db-url="pgsql://DRUPAL_DB_USER:DRUPAL_DB_PASSWORD@127.0.0.1:5432/DRUPAL_DB" --site-name="SITE_NAME" --account-name=DRUPAL_LOGIN --account-pass=DRUPAL_PASS

This uses the same parameters from the above step, as well as:

  • SITE_NAME: Islandora 2.0
    • This is arbitrary, and is simply used to title the site on the home page
  • DRUPAL_LOGIN: islandora
    • The Drupal administrative username to use
  • DRUPAL_PASS: islandora
    • The password to use for the Drupal administrative user

Congratulations, you have a Drupal site! It currently isn’t really configured to do anything, but we’ll get those portions set up in the coming sections.