Drupal Development Tricks for Designers

Chapter 1. Setting Up a Local Development Environment and Installing Drupal

When I first started working in Drupal, I created all my sites on a staging URL (like newsite.tzk-design.com) that lived as a subdomain of my studio website. Updating a module meant downloading the project from drupal.org, unpacking and uploading it to the staging URL, then running updates manually on the server. Theming meant making changes to a file, uploading it to the server, and refreshing the page to see changes.

While this is a totally reasonable way to work, there were a few problems with it:

• Depending on my Internet connection or the size of a file, uploading files to a server took a significant amount of time—particularly when you add up the time spent tweaking little bits of CSS and checking the results.

• If I had no Internet connection (for example, when traveling), or the connection was spotty, I was screwed.

• Perhaps most importantly, everything I was doing could conceivably be found by someone else on the Web. This left me constantly worried that people—particularly clients—would end up randomly finding my half-finished work all over the Web. And while there were certainly ways to avoid that, like HTTP authentication on the server^[1], that alone didn’t solve the first two problems, which are much more annoying.

When I finally figured out how to set up a local hosting environment on my laptop (thanks to a few wonderful friends in the Drupal community, including developer Ben Buckman, interviewed earlier), ...