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Try the new Drupal Console installer and executable phar file

Jesus Manuel Olivas
December 09, 2014

Little more than a month since my last blog post, where I do announced The Drupal 8 Console will sync Drupal 8 Beta releases and we are still in in sync with Beta 2 even when Drupal is Beta 03, but we have been working the project and I will share what is new:

The new landing page

The drupal console have a new landing page http://drupalconsole.com/ this is an external site outside of the drupal project page and the github repository, we plan to use this a comunication channel for any news related to the project.

At now this is only a plain HTML site, but we are working with Omar Aguirre one of the project co-maintainers to convert this to a Drupal 8 site. I will keep you informed.

The new installer

One of the most recurring questions since project started is why is the installation process modifying the composer.json & composer.lock file, or why is the installer adding new libraries to "core/vendor" directory, because you know that is considered hacking the core.

The new installation steps

//Change to Drupal 8 installation root directory $ cd path/to/drupal8.dev // Run curl in your terminal: $ curl -LSs http://drupalconsole.com/installer | php // Or if you don't have curl: $ php -r "readfile('http://drupalconsole.com/installer');" | php

When using the new installer method, we are no longer modifying the composer.json & composer.lock files or adding extra libraries to "core/vendor" directory.

The new executable phar file

Before showing you how to execute the console.phar lets try to undestand what is a phar file, based on the official php documentation

Phar archives are best characterized as a convenient way to group several files into a single file. As such, a phar archive provides a way to distribute a complete PHP application in a single file and run it from that file without the need to extract it to disk. Additionally, phar archives can be executed by PHP as easily as any other file, both on the commandline and from a web server. Phar is kind of like a thumb drive for PHP applications.

How to execute the console.phar file:

//Use the console.phar $ php console.phar

You can see how easy is to run the installation process and execute the console.phar file on the following animated gif (I am using this image format because is vintage and cool).

Putting all the pieces together, and as I mentioned on twitter a few days ago. I will show you how to create a Drupal 8 module in 4 easy steps:

How to create a #drupal8 module: 1 cd path/to/drupal8 2 curl -LSs http://t.co/R2TX2VxyPC | php 3 php console.phar generate:module 4 profit

— Jesus Manuel Olivas (@jmolivas) November 26, 2014

I want to thank people for maintaining the blogs and pages where I found some links mentioning the console project:

Feel fee to try the new installer and console executable phar file and make sure you let us know any inconvenience, error messages or recommendations commenting on this page, or adding a new issue on the drupal project page or the github repository.

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