Creating a new project with Acquia BLT¶

To create a new Acquia BLT project, complete the following steps:

1. Determine a machine name for your new project (such as my-project). For compatibility with third-party tools, Acquia recommends you use only letters, numbers, and hyphens for the machine name.

2. In a command prompt window, run the following command to both create your new project and download all dependencies (including Acquia BLT):

   composer create-project --no-interaction acquia/blt-project my-project
   

3. Change to your project directory. For example:

   cd my-project
   

4. If this is your first time using Acquia BLT on this computer, restart your shell to allow Bash to detect the new Acquia BLT alias.

5. Customize your blt/blt.yml file to select an install profile. The build.yml file includes all available configuration values.

   By default, Acquia BLT installs websites using the Lightning profile. You can change this setting to any other core, contributed, or custom profile in your codebase.

   To change to another profile, complete the following steps:

   1. Download the profile of your choice, based on the following command:

      composer require acquia/headless_lightning:~1.1.0
      

   2. Enter the name of the profile in the blt/blt.yml file, in the profile:name setting. For example:

      profile: name: minimal
      

6. Start your application hosting stack (also called a LAMP stack) by running the following command to create a Drupal VM instance:

   blt vm
   

   To customize your virtual machine (VM), such as to enable Solr or to change the PHP version, respond no when Acquia BLT offers to boot your VM, and then make any necessary modifications to the box/config.yml file before starting your VM.

   Using your own LAMP stack

   To set up your own LAMP stack, see Local development with Acquia BLT, and then execute the following command to generate default local settings files:

   blt blt:init:settings
   

   Change the generated docroot/sites/default/settings/local.settings.php file by adding your custom MySql credentials.

7. Install Drupal and generate any remaining required files (such as settings.php or hash salt) by running the following command:

   blt setup
   

8. Sign in to Drupal by running the following command:

   drush @my-project.local uli
   

   Be sure to replace my-project with the name of your project, which must be the value of project.machine_name in the blt/blt.yml file.

You now have a running local Drupal website that uses Acquia BLT.

For information about common instructions and how to begin using Acquia BLT, see Next steps with Acquia BLT.

./vendor/bin/blt blt:init:shell-alias
source ~/.bash_profile

composer run-script blt-alias
source ~/.bash_profile