Drupal 8

Drupal is a free and open source content-management framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides a back-end framework for at least 2.3% of all web sites worldwide – ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites.

Lando offers a configurable recipe for developing Drupal 8 apps.

Getting Started
Configuration
Connecting to your database
Importing Your Database
Tooling

Getting Started

Before you get started with this recipe we assume that you have:

Installed Lando and gotten familar with its basics
Initialized a Landofile for your codebase for use with this recipe
Read about the various services, tooling, events and routing Lando offers.

However, because you are a developer and developers never ever RTFM you can also run the following commands to try out this recipe with a vanilla install of Drupal 8.

# Initialize a drupal8 recipe using the latest drupal 8 version
lando init \
  --source remote \
  --remote-url https://www.drupal.org/download-latest/tar.gz \
  --remote-options="--strip-components 1" \
  --recipe drupal8 \
  --webroot . \
  --name my-first-drupal8-app

# Start it up
lando start

# List information about this app.
lando info

Configuration

While Lando recipes set sane defaults so they work out of the box they are also configurable.

Here are the configuration options, set to the default values, for this recipe. If you are unsure about where this goes or what this means we highly recommend scanning the recipes documentation to get a good handle on how the magicks work.

recipe: drupal8
config:
  php: '7.2'
  via: apache:2.4
  webroot: .
  database: mysql:5.7
  drush: ^8
  xdebug: false
  config:
    database: SEE BELOW
    php: SEE BELOW
    server: SEE BELOW
    vhosts: SEE BELOW

Note that if the above config options are not enough all Lando recipes can be further extended and overriden.

Choosing a php version

You can set php to any version that is available in our php service. However, you should consult the Drupal requirements to make sure that version is actually supported by Drupal 8 itself.

Here is the recipe config to set the Drupal 8 recipe to use php version 7.0

recipe: drupal8
config:
  php: '7.0'

Choosing a webserver

By default this recipe will be served by the default version of our apache service but you can also switch this to use nginx. We highly recommend you check out both the apache and nginx services before you change the default via.

With Apache (default)

recipe: drupal8
config:
  via: apache

With nginx

recipe: drupal8
config:
  via: nginx

Choosing a database backend

By default this recipe will use the default version of our mysql service as the database backend but you can also switch this to use mariadb or 'postgres' instead. Note that you can also specify a version as long as it is a version available for use with lando for either mysql, mariadb or postgres.

If you are unsure about how to configure the database we highly recommend you check out the mysql, mariadband 'postgres' services before you change the default.

Also note that like the configuration of the php version you should consult the Drupal 8 requirements to make sure the database and version you select is actually supported by Drupal 8 itself.

Using MySQL (default)

recipe: drupal8
config:
  database: mysql

Using MariaDB

recipe: drupal8
config:
  database: mariadb

Using Postgres

recipe: drupal8
config:
  database: postgres

Using a custom version

recipe: drupal8
config:
  database: postgres:9.6

Using Drush

By default our Drupal 8 recipe will globally install the latest version of Drush 8 or the latest version of Drush 7 if you are using php 5.3. This means that you should be able to use lando drush out of the box.

That said you can configure this recipe to use any version of Drush to which there is a resolvable package available via composer. That means that the following are all valid.

Use the latest version of Drush

recipe: drupal8
config:
  drush: "*"

Use the latest version of Drush 7

recipe: drupal8
config:
  drush: ^7

Use a specific version of Drush 8

recipe: drupal8
config:
  drush: 8.1.15

Using a site-local Drush

While Lando will globally install Drush for you it is increasingly common and in some cases a straight-up best practice to install a site-local Drush by requiring it in your projects composer.json file.

Because of how Lando's php service sets up its PATH this means that if you have indeed installed Drush on your own via composer Lando will use yours over its own. Said more explicitly: if you've required drush via composer in your application then this recipe will use your drush and not the one you've specified in this recipes config.

If you are using a site-local Drush it is also recommended to configure a build step to automatically install Drush before your app starts up. This can prevent weird version mismatches and other issues if you are using Drush in other Lando automation like events.

Automatically composer install before my app starts

recipe: drupal8
services:
  appserver:
    build:
      - composer install

If you find that Lando is not using your drush as expected, which can happen if you've modified composer to install in a different directory than its normal vendor you can take advantage of Lando's tooling overrides and specify an absolute path to your Drush.

tooling:
  drush:
    cmd: /path/to/my/drush

Default URL Setup

You may see http://default show up in many drush commands you run.

lando drush uli
// http://default/user/reset/1/1548025070/Px6PbLyJ_2laXqoDe6OukHXaX-cXExo4ErfrKbkqsE4/login

This happens because it is actually a difficult problem for Lando to 100% know the canonical URL or service that is serving your application. However you can set up your environment so that commands like lando drush uli return the proper URL.

Create or edit the relevant settings.php file and add these lines. Note that you may need to specify a port depending on your Lando installation. You can run lando info to see if your URLs use explicit ports or not.

$base_url = "http://mysite.lndo.site:PORT_IF_NEEDED"

Aliases

You can also use drush aliases with command like lando drush @sitealias cc all by following the instructions below.

Make sure the alias file exists within the drush folder in your app. An example could be the files structure below.

|-- app
   |-- drush
      |-- yoursite.aliases.drushrc.php

For info on how to setup your alias please refer to the following link or see this example.

Then configure the following build step in your Landofile and lando rebuild.

services:
  appserver:
    build:
      - /bin/sh -c "mkdir -p ~/.drush/site-aliases"
      - /bin/sh -c "ln -sf /app/drush/yoursite.aliases.drushrc.php ~/.drush/site-aliases/yoursite.drushrc.php"

Configuring your root directory

If you are using a webroot besides . you will need to remember to cd into that directory and run lando drush from there. This is because many site-specific drush commands will only run correctly if you run drush from a directory that also contains a Drupal site.

If you are annoyed by having to cd into that directory every time you run a drush command you can get around it by overriding the drush tooling command in your Landofile so that Drush always runs from your webroot.

Note that hardcoding the root like this may have unforseen and bad consequences for some drush commands such as drush scr.

tooling:
  drush:
    service: appserver
    cmd: drush --root=/app/PATH/TO/WEBROOT

Using xdebug

This is just a passthrough option to the xdebug setting that exists on all our php services. The tl;dr is xdebug: true enables and configures the php xdebug extension and xdebug: false disables it.

recipe: drupal8
config:
  xdebug: true|false

However, for more information we recommend you consult the php service documentation.

Using custom config files

You may need to override our default Drupal 8 config with your own.

If you do this you must use files that exist inside your application and express them relative to your project root as below.

Note that the default files may change based on how you set both ssl and via. Also note that the vhosts and server config will be either for apache or nginx depending on how you set via. We highly recommend you check out both the apache and nginx if you plan to use a custom vhosts or server config.

A hypothetical project

Note that you can put your configuration files anywhere inside your application directory. We use a config directory in the below example but you can call it whatever you want such as .lando.

./
|-- config
   |-- default.conf
   |-- my-custom.cnf
   |-- php.ini
   |-- server.conf
|-- index.php
|-- .lando.yml

Landofile using custom drupal8 config

recipe: drupal8
config:
  config:
    database: config/my-custom.cnf
    php: config/php.ini
    server: config/server.conf
    vhosts: config/default.conf

Connecting to your database

Lando will automatically set up a database with a user and password and also set an environment variables called LANDO INFO that contains useful information about how your application can access other Lando services.

Here is the default database connection information for a Drupal 8 site. Note that the host is not localhost but database.

database: drupal8
username: drupal8
password: drupal8
host: database
# for mysql
port: 3306
# for postgres
# port: 5432

You can get also get the above information, and more, by using the lando info command.

Importing Your Database

Once you've started up your Drupal 8 site you will need to pull in your database and files before you can really start to dev all the dev. Pulling your files is as easy as downloading an archive and extracting it to the correct location. Importing a database can be done using our helpful lando db-import command.

# Grab your database dump
curl -fsSL -o database.sql.gz "https://url.to.my.db/database.sql.gz"

# Import the database
# NOTE: db-import can handle uncompressed, gzipped or zipped files
# Due to restrictions in how Docker handles file sharing your database
# dump MUST exist somewhere inside of your app directory.
lando db-import database.sql.gz

You can learn more about the db-import command over here

Tooling

By default each Lando Drupal 8 recipe will also ship with helpful dev utilities.

This means you can use things like drush, composer and php via Lando and avoid mucking up your actual computer trying to manage php versions and tooling.

lando composer          Runs composer commands
lando db-export [file]  Exports database from a service into a file
lando db-import <file>  Imports a dump file into database service
lando drupal            Runs drupal console commands
lando drush             Runs drush commands
lando mysql             Drops into a MySQL shell on a database service
lando php               Runs php commands

Usage examples

# Download a dependency with drush
lando drush dl views

# Run composer tests
lando composer test

# Drop into a mysql shell
lando mysql

# Check hte app's installed php extensions
lando php -m

You can also run lando from inside your app directory for a complete list of commands which is always advisable as your list of commands may not 100% be the same as the above. For example if you set database: postgres you will get lando psql instead of lando mysql.

← Drupal 7 Joomla →

# Drupal 8

# Getting Started

# Configuration

# Choosing a php version

# Choosing a webserver

# With Apache (default)

# With nginx

# Choosing a database backend

# Using MySQL (default)

# Using MariaDB

# Using Postgres

# Using a custom version

# Using Drush

# Use the latest version of Drush

# Use the latest version of Drush 7

# Use a specific version of Drush 8

# Using a site-local Drush

# Default URL Setup

# Aliases

# Configuring your root directory

# Using xdebug

# Using custom config files

# Connecting to your database

# Importing Your Database

# Tooling