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This guide gives you a detailed overview of Drupal concepts, helps you understand Drupal’s structure, and assists in determining whether Drupal is the right fit for your project.

Before installing Drupal, it’s a good idea to get a general understanding of what it is and how it works—both on a local host and on any live hosting you may use. This small investment of time can greatly benefit you in the long run. Go ahead and explore Drupal best practices!

Why Drupal?

Drupal is a free open-source content management system that can be adapted and customized for both simple websites and complex web applications. Drupal grows with you, offering thousands of free modules and themes to help you reach your audience, spread your message, build brand awareness, and create a community.

The Drupal User Guide is a tutorial guide for building and maintaining Drupal websites. The User Guide is written, updated, and translated by volunteers as part of the User Guide project.

On this page, you can download electronic versions of the User Guide in English and partially/fully translated into at least 10 languages. Each language is available as a separate archive file containing versions of the User Guide in PDF, ePub, Mobi, and AZW3 formats.

This guide covers the detailed system requirements for installing Drupal.

In general, websites built using only the Drupal core (i.e., without contributed modules) are compatible with all modern browsers that support CSS and JavaScript (with minor visual differences) and are fully functional in them. Drupal only guarantees support for a list of supported browsers.

Supported Browsers

The latest release of each of the two most recent supported major versions:
Desktop browsers:

MySQL, MariaDB or Percona Server (Recommended)

MySQL 5.5.3 / MariaDB 5.5.20 / Percona Server 5.5.8 or higher is required with InnoDB as the primary storage engine, and the PDO database extension is required.

Note 1: MySQL 8 is supported only on Drupal 8.6 or later. See this issue.

Drupal 8 runs on any web server that supports the required PHP version.

Many hosting providers offer different PHP version options. The default PHP version may be older than what Drupal requires, so check your current version in your host's control panel and upgrade to the latest supported version if necessary.

Some individual modules may have special requirements for PHP extensions and configurations beyond those listed below, so please refer to the module documentation.

If you run Drupal on a system where PHP is compiled or restricted to using 32-bit integers, you will only be able to input dates between 1901 and 2038 (specifically from 20:45:52 UTC on December 13, 1901 to 03:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038). This is commonly known as the Year 2038 problem.

Installing Drupal requires that you first have a web server and a database server.

For "local" and "online" Linux-based servers using Apache and MySQL, the software needed to run Drupal is known as the "AMP stack", although Microsoft-based servers and databases are also available in similar packages known as stacks.

AMP Stack