Get the code

Use one of these four ways, skip the others.

Automatically

Most will use this one command to automatically install Drupal. Use Composer to install and manage Drupal and all dependencies (modules, themes, libraries). Make sure you have Composer installed on the host where you're going to install Drupal before executing any Composer commands.

To install the current official release of Drupal, run

composer create-project drupal/recommended-project my_site_name_dir

Or to install a specific version, just append that version, like this drupal/recommended-project:xx.x.x to the above.

This will download and create a Drupal project in my_site_name_dir then automatically execute composer install to download Drupal and all its dependencies. For more information read Download Drupal core using Composer in the Using Composer developer guide. Using Composer requires that you are able to use a command line on the machine where you plan to install Drupal.

If you did this, then skip the rest.

Convert existing

Convert your existing Drupal site to a Composer-managed project using this guide.

Manually

A few may want to manually download and manually install Drupal. If Composer is not an option for you, there are detailed instructions, with screenshots, for the manual installation in Section 3.3 of the Drupal User Guide. Check the project page for Drupal for the current/latest release.

Locally

Some may want to install Drupal to their local computer, so follow these instructions.

Some may want to install a local demo version of Drupal, so follow this guide.

Developers and contributors

To contribute to development, you should download Drupal using git. There is an entire section of documentation for using Git with Drupal, but you can find the basic instructions by visiting the project page for Drupal and opening the Version control tab.

Note: if you install Drupal with git, then make sure to read the page "Install dependencies with composer" in this guide.