Recently I was tasked to fire up a Drupal 8 site for one of my clients. It was a fun process and thought I’d share a few of the major steps to help those of you in the same boat. This is not an exhaustive guide but it might save you some precious hours you could use at the gym, with the family, or studying the Focus 8.
Let’s get started…
FIRST
Go to your IIS Server and download the Acquia Dev Desktop. (FYI, Acquia are the one who created Drupal)
https://dev.acquia.com/downloads
It’s a straight forward install.
SECOND
Fire the Dev Desktop application up and select the option to create a new site. It will walk you through a wizard and have you set passwords for your Drupal admin account and MySQL database. Put the site in the:
C:/inetpub/wwwroot folder.
THIRD
Since Drupal uses Apache as a default web server you’ll need to go into IIS and configure the site manually which is pretty easy. Open IIS Manager, select the default website and change the basic settings to point at the Drupal website directly. Next, make sure the IIS User has access to the directory, otherwise, your get an unauthorized error.
FOURTH
Browse to the site on the IIS box. You should get prompted with a setup wizard again. May seem odd right but it’s fine. In fact, if you have configured anything wrong, Drupal will give you a checklist of things you need to get fixed. It was a nice feature of Acquia to put that in. If there is a checklist, go through each item and knock it out. For example, you will need PHP installed.
FIFTH
That’s it! Once you go through the list you should end up on a page that looks like this.
Feel free to shoot me a email from Daxjudy.com if you have questions.
Stay Focused,
Dax