Drupal

Drupal is a self-hosted content management system web application. Its focus is on scalability, customization, and accessibility. Many large-scale institutions including those in government, higher-ed, and the non-profit sector use Drupal for running their website, but Drupal can also be used for running a humble blog, homepage, or turnkey web app.

Installation

A simple local set of Drupal can be enabled with the following configuration:

services.drupal.enable = true;

This will spin up a Drupal installation at http://localhost using nginx and MYSQL.

This configuration is functionally identical to writing:

services.drupal = {
  enable = true;
  sites = {
    "localhost" = {
      enable = true;
    };
  };
};

Configuration

It is possible to configure a number of different site settings using the settings.php file that comes installed with every Drupal instance.

The settings.php file is located at /var/lib/drupal/<hostname>/sites/default/settings.php for each website you install. So if your website is installed at http://localhost, the path to the settings would be /var/lib/drupal/localhost/sites/default/settings.php

See the official documentation for more information on how to use settings.php.

State Directory

Every website you run in NixOS will install a state directory at /var/lib/drupal/<hostname>. This directory contains a simple file tree with some Drupal files you can edit.

Note: at the time of writing this, not every file in this directory will be symlinked to the Drupal package in /nix/store. See the [#customization Customization] section below for more information.

In order to edit anything in the state directory, your user must be a part of the webserver group.

If you use nginx, you would add:

users.users.<user>.extraGroups = ["nginx"];

Installing Modules & Themes Using The State Directory

You can copy/paste modules and themes directly from drupal.org into the state directory and Drupal will detect them.

Modules can be copied into /var/lib/drupal/<hostname>/modules and themes can be copied into /var/lib/drupal/<hostname>/themes.

If you want to use Caddy, you would add:

users.users.<user>.extraGroups = ["caddy"];

Alternatively, you can log in as root and edit any file in the state directory you like.

Using Caddy

The Drupal service uses the nginx webserver by default, but you can switch to the Caddy webserver by writing:

services.drupal.webserver = "caddy";

Note: there is currently no API for changing the webserver on individual projects. The webserver you pick will be used for every instance of Drupal you run on NixOS.