LocalGov Drupal docs

# Working with DDEV

# Installing LocalGov Drupal locally with Composer and DDEV.

First of all, you will need to install DDEV on your local machine – please check the requirements (most importantly Docker) for doing so, depending on your OS, and then install by following the appropriate instructions here:

DDEV installation - short version (opens new window)

DDEV installation - long version (opens new window)

Next, the assumption is that if you have been working with Drupal already, then you will already have Composer installed, but just in case:

Get Composer (opens new window)

To install LocalGov Drupal locally for testing or development, use the Composer-based project template (opens new window) by running the following command (and changing PROJECT-NAME to whatever you’d like your project directory to be called):

composer create-project localgovdrupal/localgov-project PROJECT-NAME --no-install

Now move into the project directory just created and initialize DDEV for the project:

cd PROJECT-NAME
ddev config

Running ddev config will prompt you for answers to three questions:

  • What’s the site name? -- Hit enter to accept default
  • What’s the location of the docroot? -- Hit enter to accept default
  • What type of project is it? Such as Drupal, PHP, WordPress, etc. -- Hit enter to accept default

    NB// Normally, DDEV should be able to figure out the answers to all three of these and input them by default, meaning you can just hit ‘enter, enter, enter’ to speed up the initialization, though if really necessary you can overwrite any as you wish.
    However, as installing LocalGovDrupal itself is done in two parts (the composer command above and the ddev composer/drush commands below), the eventual docroot and type of the project will not be known to DDEV at this stage as they don’t actually exist yet, so ddev config will need to be run again later, as can be seen further down in these instructions.
    While just hitting ‘enter, enter, enter’ is fine both times, you may notice this first time through that the defaults DDEV sets seem wrong, as it will choose the current directory for the docroot and a standard PHP project for the type. This is perfectly fine (and in fact is best left alone), so long as the second time through running ddev config below you ensure that docroot is entered as ‘web’ and that the project type corresponds to the latest major version of Drupal (at the time of writing, Drupal 9, so in this case, ‘drupal9’ would be entered) – by the point of that second running of ddev config, DDEV should automatically recognize these as new defaults, meaning hitting ‘enter, enter, enter’ is fine again then.

Once DDEV has initialized, it may be that you want to run ddev auth ssh in order to configure SSH access inside the DDEV container (for example, to connect the project to online repositories that require such access).

At this stage you’re ready to finish installing LocalGov Drupal:

ddev composer install
ddev config

Don't forget to hit ‘enter, enter, enter’ here again to accept the defaults suggested by ddev config, as mentioned in the NB above. Then:

ddev drush si localgov -y

Note: As you might be running a different version of PHP on your host machine from the version that DDEV runs, it is advisable to run composer install and drush commands from within DDEV. This ensures dependencies reflect the PHP version that the webserver is actually running.

Once the LocalGov Drupal installer has finished running, it will give you a username and password. Make a note of these and then start the containers for the project by running ddev start (you can later stop them again, unsurprisingly, by running ddev stop).

Then use the credentials noted above to sign in to your now up-and-running new DDEV/LGD project by navigating to the following address:

https://PROJECT-NAME.ddev.site/user

Optional: you can also delete the .lando.dist.yml file in the project’s root, as it is redundant when using DDEV instead of Lando.