CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Lightning

Local development

Note that these instructions won't work on old, unsupported branches of Lightning. At the time of this writing, that includes the 8.x-1.x and 8.x-2.x branches, which have long since reached the end of their lives.

This documentation describes how to set up Lightning (or any of its components) for development on a machine running a Unix-like operating system (e.g., Linux or macOS). We assume that:

• You have Git installed in your PATH. You can confirm this by running git --version.
• You have PHP 7.1 or later installed in your PATH. You can confirm this by running php --version.
• You have Composer installed in your PATH. You can confirm this by running composer --version. You should also have Composer's global binary directory (usually $HOME/.composer/vendor/bin) in your PATH.
• You will need drush/drush-launcher globally installed. To confirm this, run drush --version. If the command is not found, run composer global require drush/drush-launcher.
• You will also need a database server installed. Lightning uses SQLite by default for development, since it is the most lightweight option supported by Drupal core.

Now, get your Lightning code base set up:

1. Clone the git repository, e.g. git clone git@github.com:acquia/lightning.git
2. Enter the repository and run composer install to install all dependencies.
3. Install Lightning and all necessary components by running ./install-drupal.sh. By default, this will try to install a SQLite database file called db.sqlite in the docroot directory. You can override this by passing a DB_URL environment variable to install-drupal.sh, containing the Drush-compatible URL of the database you want to use. For example:

DB_URL=mysql://user:password@server/drupal ./install-drupal.sh

4. Run the web server. The quickest option is to use PHP's built-in server: drush runserver 8080
5. You should now be able to access your Lightning site at http://localhost:8080.