Now that you’ve finished installing Drupal 8, you can add additional functionality to your site by installing modules, or customize the look and feel by installing themes.
The standard Drupal core installation has limited features and looks fairly plain. However, Drupal is designed to be modular, making it easy to extend with additional modules and themes.
Install one or more modules to modify, extend, or enhance Drupal with additional functionality.
Composer is a PHP package manager. It provides functionality similar to Drupal’s native dependency management and Drush make, but for any project—not just Drupal modules. Many Drupal 8 modules depend on generic PHP packages that must be included in the site’s codebase using Composer.
Which modules have Composer dependencies?
There are several ways to determine if a module has Composer dependencies:
In addition to installing modules via the user interface, you can also download and install modules from the command line:
The recommended method for installing themes is via Composer.
Drupal 8 places all core themes in a directory named /core/themes, and all contributed or custom themes in a directory named /themes (in the webroot). Check the detailed contents of the README.txt file in the /themes directory for more information.
Most contributed modules receive periodic updates that fix security issues, resolve functionality problems, add new features, or all three. It is recommended to regularly check for new versions of the modules you use and update them as new releases become available.
The module update process is well described in the User Guide — read Chapter 13.6: “Updating a Module”.
Go to the “Extend” page if you’re not already there.
On the “Extend” page, each row in the table corresponds to one module and starts on the left with a checkbox, immediately followed by the module name.
To the right of the module name is the third column containing the module’s description.
If you don’t see the descriptions
If you don’t see the description for each module next to its name, your admin theme’s “responsive” layout is hiding them.
Some modules actually don’t require you to do anything — they simply do their job behind the scenes. However, these modules likely don’t have configurable settings or serve only as dependencies for other modules.
Most of the time, the module you’re interested in is something for which you can configure permissions and settings. Some projects are easy to use — they are “intuitive,” and it’s relatively clear what you can configure and what needs to be done to make them work as intended.
This is a temporary placeholder. Some content from the section Installing Drupal 8 Modules | Drupal 8 Guide on Drupal.org should be moved here.
To remove an unused module, you must be certain that the module is not being used on your site so that it doesn’t affect any functionality.
You can use either Drush or the administrative interface to remove modules.
Using Drush