Free cloud hosting
Acquia is a company founded by the creator of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, which specializes in Drupal. Pantheon is another company which specializes in Drupal. Both of these offer a free sandbox hosting for Drupal.
offerings which allow you to host and develop a Drupal 8 site on a hosted Internet-based web server. Both services offer a one-click install of Drupal. If you choose to use one of these, you can skip directly now to the section entitled Installing Drupal 8.
Acquia Dev Desktop
Acquia offers a free local development environment for Windows and Mac called Acquia Dev Desktop that you can download and install on your own local machine in order to run Drupal 8 in the shortest possible time.
Download either the Windows or Mac version of the Acquia Dev Desktop from https://www.acquia.com/downloads and install it selecting the defaults for the various settings.
Once you have completed the installation, you will be offered the opportunity to run it.
When you do, you will see the stack start up in the background, and in the foreground you will see a welcome window offering some choices.
The first option is what we are after right now, so click on it:
If for any reason you cannot access the preceding pop-up choice window, you can always get back there by clicking on the + sign in the bottom left-hand corner with choices including New Drupal site… that you should select:
At the time of going to click on it, there are several choices available to you, some notable ones being:
- Drupal: This is the official Drupal 7 core. No extras added.
- Drupal 8: This is the official Drupal 8 core. These official releases come bundled with a variety of modules and themes to give you a good starting point to help build your site.
Also included are a number of other distributions—various ready-to-go packages built around Drupal 7, most notably the following:
- Drupal Commons: This lets you create content-rich community websites built on Drupal 7. You can easily add wikis, calendars, groups, and other social web capabilities.
- OpenAtrium: This is an intranet in a box' that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations and collaboration.
- OpenPublic: This is designed for open government requirements, such as improving citizen services, providing public access to data and a public forum for two-way communication with agencies, without compromising accessibility, security, or usability.
- OpenScholar: This helps the management of educational institutions by providing Drupal-based professor pages, class catalogs, sandboxes, and extra tools for administration.
Locate the Drupal 8 offering and select install to begin the installation process:
Optionally, in the following dialog and in order to keep your installation precisely in line with the given screenshots, change the following:
- Local codebase folder.
- Local site name to Drupal 8 as shown in the following:
Now, select Finish. Since you are setting up Drupal from scratch and have no pre-existing database, all the remaining default options will be fine, and a database named drupal_8 will be created automatically. Apache will be appropriately configured, as will your local host file.
Tip
Dev Desktop sets up Apache on port 8083 rather than the standard (default) port of 80 so that it can be run on a local system without administrator privileges and without interfering with other local services. This means that when talking to sites governed by the Dev Desktop, you should always suffix your URLs with :8083.