Arizona Quickstart
Demonstration/starter Drupal distribution and installation profile that packages
various features consistent with community best practices and University of
Arizona brand strategy.
A Complete Customized Drupal
AZ Quickstart is a complete customized version of the popular Drupal content
management system, not an add-on to an existing Drupal-based web site.
Previously, to start a new Drupal site you would prepare a web server and
database, then install the core software following the instructions in its
Installing Drupal document and the
installation chapter
in its user guide.
This would produce a minimally functional web site with no content, which you
could then customize by adding themes and modules to fit it to your needs.
Increasingly, however, you can install Drupal distributions, which not only
contain the core, but also complete sets of additions to make it almost
immediately useful for a particular purpose, such as an online storefront. AZ
Quickstart is the distribution that provides many of the features specific to
the University of Arizona, and rather than an empty site, can include some
demonstration content (which can nevertheless be turned off instantly).
How to Contribute
See our contributing document for detailed instructions on
how to contribute including:
Where to Install Your Quickstart Site
The university's Campus Web Services group provides ready-to-use sites based on
Quickstart for anyone who isn't comfortable with web development or system
administration. Behind the scenes, a web hosting service called Pantheon hosts
these sites, so in cases where people require more control and flexibility
in a Quickstart site than these can provide, there are ways they can also host
it independently on Pantheon, and many important university sites are already
there. However, there are many other options for hosting web sites based on
Arizona Quickstart; the only caveat is that anyone following one of these has
to maintain their responsibility for keeping the system and web site secure
and up-to-date. A generic hosting option that has been around for many years
is known as LAMP: the combination of the Linux operating system, Apache web
server, MySQL database, and PHP scripting language, so it is worth giving a
more extensive example of using this, but many variations are common (for
example, substituting Nginx for the Apache web server software).
System Requirements
Arizona Quickstart's system requirements are almost identical to
Drupal's own requirements,
in particular the requirements for Drupal 9. Some additional things that need
emphasized or checked are:
- Make sure the system has enough memory: even if the running site consumes little, updates and installations are memory-intensive.
- Check that PHP's configuration allows it to use the memory (see the memory requirements section).
- Re-check that the required PHP extensions are added: on a recent system the usual packaging mechanism should suffice to add them (such as apt on Debian or Ubuntu versions of Linux).
- Check that the Apache configuration enables
mod_rewrite, and the module letting it work with PHP.
- Check the user and group of the running web server: in many Debian-derived Linux systems these will be
www-data, but not on all (this information is needed for setting file and directory permissions later).
- Install and configure the software as a normal (non-root) user with the ability to
sudo when elevated privileges are needed; add this user to the same group that the web server uses (so you would see something like www-data:x:33:normaluser in the /etc/group file).
- A recent version of Composer is a necessity, not an option — remove any previously installed but stale versions, and follow the https://getcomposer.org/download/ instructions to install it, or if upgrading is possible, try the command
sudo -H composer self-update --2
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
