Chapter 1. Setting Up Our Development Environment

Regardless of you being a seasoned web developer or someone who is just about to start learning Drupal, there are few things that everybody needs to have in place before we can get started:

• First, is to make sure that we have an Application stack that will meet Drupal 8's system requirements. MAMP provides us with a standalone web server that is generally referred to as an AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack and is available for both OS X and Windows. We will look at installing and configuring this local web server in preparation to install Drupal 8.
• Second, is to set up a Drupal 8 instance and learn the process of installing Drupal instances into our AMP stack. There are a few changes on how the configuration and installation processes work in Drupal 8, so we will take a closer look to ensure that we all begin development from the same starting point.
• Third, we will be reviewing the Admin interface, including the new responsive Admin menu and any configuration changes that have been made as we navigate to familiar sections of our site. We will also look at how to extend our website using contributed modules, review changes to the files and folder structure that make up Drupal 8, and discuss best practices to manage your files.
• Finally, we will review the exercise files that we will be using throughout the series, including how to download and extract files, how to use phpMyAdmin—a database administration tool to back up and restore database snapshots—and how to inspect elements within our HTML structure using Google Chrome.

Let's get started by installing our web environment that we will be using as we take an exciting look at Drupal 8 theming with Twig.