Getting ready

Before we start, you will need a development environment that meets the new system requirements for Drupal 8:

Apache 2.0 (or higher) or Nginx 1.1 (or higher) web server
PHP 5.5.9 or higher, but PHP 5.6 or PHP 7 is recommended, as PHP 5.5 has reached its end-of-life support
MySQL 5.5 or MariaDB 5.5.20 for your database

You will need a user with privileges to create databases or a created database with a user who has privileges to make tables in that database.

Access to upload or move files to the server
While a default installation of PHP will work with Drupal, it does require certain PHP extensions, such as mbstring. Check out https://www.drupal.org/requirements/php for up-to-date requirement information.

Drupal 8 ships with Symfony ( https://symfony.com/) components. One of the new dependencies in Drupal 8, to support the Symfony routing system, is the Drupal Clean URL functionality. If the server is using Apache, ensure that mod_rewrite is enabled. If the server is using Nginx, the ngx_http_rewrite_module must be enabled.

We will download Drupal 8 and place its files in your web server's document root. This is the /var/www folder. If you used a tool, such as XAMPP, WAMP, or MAPP, consult the proper documentation to know your document root.

For full system requirements for Drupal 8, check out https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/system-requirements/. The Drupal.org documentation is currently being migrated. Also, review the Drupal 7 requirements page on https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/system-requirements/overview, which highlights Drupal 8 items, as well.