Preparing to Install and/or Development Sites topics -- mention more alternatives?

Hm.... So, on
https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide/en/install-prepare.html
in step 5, it says that if you are using the web installer, you will need to download the files from drupal.org and upload them to your site. Is that what you were talking about in your first question?

See also
#2831907: Topic install-prepare: Add specifics about using archive files
which is proposing a related change to this section of the topic.

Regarding your other question, we do have a section at the top that suggests using a one-click installer from a hosting provider as one option, but we haven't really covered options like Bitnami and Acquia Dev Desktop -- both of which I think are mostly options for setting up local dev sites, right? So maybe they would be better in that topic:

https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide/en/install-dev-making.html

Or then again, maybe it would belong in the "Preparing to install" topic... I'm just not sure where these options would belong best, if we were to add them.

Also, I'm not familiar with Bitnami, but for instance I would never suggest people use the Linux "Drupal" package to install Drupal -- they are always so out of date, and it makes it difficult to do updates and additions. So... I'm unsure about advocating Bitnami (are they good about keeping up with Drupal in a timely manner?). And I also don't think we would probably want to specifically advocate Bitnami (which appears to be a commercial enterprise) rather than other providers of similar downloads.

What do you think?

OK, let's leave this open and think about it further.... I'm going to rewrite the issue title and summary. Please see if it reflects your thoughts, thanks!

I'm not sure how I feel about this either. Assigning temporarily to Joe for comment. Thanks!

In regards to covering additional tools like Bitnami, XAMPP, etc. I get a little bit concerned that if we specifically mention one or two we open up a can of worms where we now need to figure out which to include, and which to exclude. For example, if we say, "Use VM solution X", what about the other dozen VM solutions?

I would rather that we be somewhat generic in the guide and then link people to a page in the community documentation that explains all the possible options in more detail. Like for example https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/local-server-setup

So maybe we add a section for "Pre-configured environment" or whatever we want to call this with some text like:

Use a pre-configured environment or virtual machine that contains Drupal and all the required supporting software to install Drupal locally. See Drupal.org's Local server setup guide for possible options.

This is a weird one though since like you mention these types of options. Like Dev Desktop, kind of span both https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide/en/install-prepare.html, and https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide/en/install-requirements.html and could probably live in either. I think I would be fine with adding it to the install-prepare page though.

That sounds like an excellent plan. Thanks!

I don't see anything on that Local Server Setup page https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/local-server-setup about Bitnami and things like that, which are environments (?? not sure what the word is) to download for XAMPP (at least, I think they are not VMs)? Maybe something about those could be added as a subpage... I don't really have a clue how to use them or what they are, but they seem like maybe a good solution for some people?

Anyone want to make a patch for the Preparing to Install page?

You have to click through to Windows, or Mac, or Linux to really get into the more detailed instructions. There you'll find things like documentation for Acquia Dev Desktop, and Bitnami - https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/local-server-setup/windows/set-up-lo...

We could potentially bubble things like that that are cross platform up to the main Local Server Setup page so they are easier to discover.

There are a large variety of these one-click install platforms. Some, like Dev Desktop are wrappers around tools like XAMPP which provide all the server stuff. Others like Bitnami and Kalabox are wrappers around VMs and/or Docker containers which provide the underlying server stuff. And then even some of the Drupal specific VMs are setup in such a way that you can in theory just download the file, run a command, and ta-da you've got Drupal installed on a VM. Lots of options! Hence wanting to link to something a bit more generic instead of trying to cover them all here.

Ah. Maybe a note on the top-level page saying you should click through to the OS-specific pages for many other options would be useful then, or maybe reducing the text on the top-level page would be better, so people would be drawn to the specific pages?

Definitely agree that linking to that page is a good idea though, at least for the English User Guide. The problem is, though, what do you do for Chinese etc, that don't have that resource?

In any case, we should make sure that this area of documentation about making a local development site is linked in "Additional Resources" on both the Preparing to Install and Making a Development Site topics.

I'll update the issue summary with the latest plan...

Next week I plan to take care of this, along with some other content updates.

Also added a task to Remaining Tasks to notify translation groups about this change.

Here's a patch. Actually written by Joe (see #6), with slight modification by me (added "section for your operating system under").

Committed. Thanks @jhodgdon and @bwinett. I'll also post a note in the appropriate translation issues.