Drupal CMS (v1): Getting Started and How to Install It on Your Server.

What is Drupal CMS?

Anyone who has worked with Drupal (core) would agree that using and building sites with Drupal has been highly technical to new adopters for some time.

To make Drupal accessible to a new audience of non-technical site builders, the Drupal Starshot Initiative was announced at DrupalCon Portland 2024.

A Drupal site builder is responsible for creating and customizing websites using a combination of pre-built modules, themes, and configurations to build functional sites without requiring extensive coding knowledge. That's as close as you would get, to building a website with Drupal without coding knowledge.

This initiative is about making a new product, the Drupal CMS, in order to address highlighted issues that have hindered adoption of Drupal for non-technical users.

Understanding the need for Drupal CMS

Instead of bloating the Drupal Core with a set of features that a majority of developers don't need, the Drupal team chose to build another product.

This approach distinguishes and appreciates the issues faced by different Drupal audiences by keeping what the community has built over the years.

At the 'core' of Drupal CMS (version 1) the extensible and powerful Drupal Core (version 11) continues to power the new product. The technical difference, lies in a set of new features, UI and UX changes, more modules, and some defaults.

This will enable a new audience of site builders to efficiently create sites in a no-code approach.

Drupal CMS Requirements

The minimum requirements to run Drupal CMS v1 before installation are;

Web server

Any of the following servers.

• Apache 2.4.7 or higher,

• Nginx 1.1 or higher.

• Or any other PHP compatible server like Litespeed or others.

Database

Any of the following will work

• MySQL 8.0 or higher.

• MariaDB 10.6 or higher.

• Percona Server 8.0 or higher.

• PostgreSQL 16 or higher. All above with an InnoDB-compatible primary storage engine

• SQLite 3.45 or higher.

Memory

• RAM 1 GB

• PHP Memory: 128MB - 512 MB (varies per site)

PHP

• Version 8.3

• Required PHP extensions; PDO, XML, GD-library, OpenSSL, JSON, cURL, Mbstring, zlib

Disk space

• Minimum 300 MB (most basic install) and varies per site.

  Dependent on the site's content, installed modules and media size can quickly get the size to 1 GB

Terminal Access

Check with your hosting provider if you have SSH access or any terminal program to run commands from.

How to Install Drupal CMS

If your hosting server meets the above system requirements, you're ready to begin the installation.

For cPanel hosting as of the time of publishing the Softaculous installer does not have a Drupal CMS installable package.

So for now terminal access is still required to install Drupal CMS and here's where it gets a little technical.

Using Composer (Terminal access required)

• Open up the terminal and navigate to the root of your site folder (depends on your server) then run the following command composer create-project drupal/cms and wait for the process to complete.

  Or else you can…

• Download the zip file on the Drupal website then type and run the command

  composer install to install all the required dependencies.

Managed Drupal Hosting

You can focus on developing and managing your Drupal CMS site, while the hosting provider takes care of the infrastructure.

By using a managed Drupal hosting provider, such as Acquia or Pantheon, you let these services handle the server setup, Drupal installation, and ongoing maintenance for you.

Need Help?

For non-developers and new-comers to the Drupal community we extend our guidance to you, be sure to let us know in the comments in case you need help setting up Drupal CMS.

Or send us an email for a detailed guidance on your use case.