Drupal 8 Blueprints

Secure Socket Shell, otherwise known as (SSH), allows us to access our directories and files on our operating system, whether it's on our local development environment or our live web server.

In order to do this on macOS, we need to launch the Terminal application. On Windows, we can use the Bash application that was explained earlier.

We can execute commands with SSH to do this; for example, we can change to another folder/directory using the following:

cd mydirectory

Alternatively, we can create a new folder/directory using this:

mkdir mydirectory

These are just some examples of SSH commands, and I encourage you to take a look into this.

When we are doing this development, especially where we are using dynamic code such as PHP, we need to be able to add other tools using the command line.

There are some very important tools that I use for development. These not only make my processes quicker, but they also allow me to enhance my development environment to how I need it.

An example of this is that if I might need to install an add-on quickly, I can do this using Homebrew.

Some of the helpful add-ons I use are as follows:

brew install curl

As macOS is built on a Unix framework, you can use this entirely to run your local host, and its just a case of editing some files on your mac and changing them. There is some great documentation on this at (http://php.net/manual/en/install.macosx.bundled.php).

This is an all-inclusive application that allows you to get started and set up with making your Drupal websites locally. We will indeed use this for the entire book. It creates the URL for your local website as well as the database and Drupal core.

We use this at Drupal events, and we are mentoring people new to Drupal (https://www.acquia.com/gb/products-services/dev-desktop).

The next two require VirtualBox. This allows us to create virtual machines on both mac and Windows. From here, we can create our separate machines and download OS images that will allow us to install Linux OS, or if you have a Windows disk, you can install this (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads).

This allows you to create and define what your virtual machine will have and require (https://vagrantup.com).

One great VM to use for Drupal can be found at (https://www.drupalvm.com).

I personally use this for all local development.

This again allows you to create and define what your development environment will have, but it uses a thing called containers to achieve this (https://www.docker.com).

In Drupal, we have several locations where our contrib and custom code go. The following figure illustrates the directory and file structure for Drupal 8.x core:

All custom and contrib items need to go into either modules, profiles, or themes.

The recommended structure inside these directories to add the contrib and custom directories. Consider the following examples:

There are other key directories here that don't need to be touched, but there is also a sites directory, which contains our sites configuration to access the database, files storage, libraries, and services.

Once our site is installed, we need to download our base theme for our site, so we can do the following to get modules or themes:

https://drupal.org/project/{module or theme name}

drush dl project, for example, drush dl bootstrap

drupal:download project

With Drupal, we can start a site without writing any code for a theme, as Drupal core comes with the following accessible themes:

Apart from these three, there are two others that are used as the entire base of Drupal core--Stable and Classy.

Classy is a subtheme of stable, makes Drupal look the way it does, and adds classes.

However, we want to get started with our own theme. So to do this, we need to open Terminal. As stated earlier, the button in DevDesktop on the right-hand side will launch our Terminal window.

Once this is open, we can download our modules and themes straight into our Drupal site. For this book, we will use Bootstrap as our base theme and then create our own theme:

drush dl bootstrap

This will download the Bootstrap theme (https://drupal.org/project/bootstrap) into our themes directory.

Now that we have Bootstrap downloaded, let's create a really basic theme so that we can add onto it later on. Inside our /themes/custom directory, create a new directory called blueprint.

This is where our custom theme will be stored; inside this, we have the ability to add our frontend structure, which includes our templates, CSS, and Javascript.

Start by creating a file called blueprint.info.yml; note that we have it structured as THEMENAME.info.yml.

In Drupal 8.x, we have adopted the use of YAML files, and you will note that all configuration in Drupal uses this format.

name: Blueprint
description: Bespoke theme for Drupal 8 Blueprints
type: theme
core: 8.x
base theme: bootstrap
# Regions