About Drupal
What is Drupal?
Drupal is a free and open-source content-management framework that can be tailored and customized to build simple websites or complex web applications. Drupal grows as you grow with thousands of free modules and themes that will help you attract the web audience you need to deliver your message, grow brand awareness, and build your community.
Drupal is accessible and multilingual, and flexible by design.
Technology Overview
Drupal is written in PHP and uses many components from Symfony, however it is not strictly speaking a Symfony app. (We explore later the ways in which Drupal diverges from modern Symfony.) In versions prior to 8.0, Drupal maintained an entirely bespoke codebase from top to bottom. From version 8.0, Drupal leverages dependency management via Composer. The inclusion of external libraries allows core maintainers to reduce the amount of custom code in areas such as low-level request handling and security.
Technical requirements
Drupal may be hosted on a wide range of environments and carries with it a modest list of runtime dependencies.
| Requirement | Version Constraints |
|---|---|
| HTTP server | Nginx >= 0.7 or Apache >= 2.4.7 |
| PHP | >= 7.3 |
| Database | One of: MySQL or Percona >= 5.7.8MariaDB >= 10.3.7SQLite (compiled into PHP) >= 3.26PostgreSQL >= 10 with the pg_trgm extension. |
Community and Governance
Drupal, like many other open-source software projects, started as a hobbyist endeavour and grew to become a large,
well-organized project with its own governance
structure, user base and technical culture. The project is backed by a nonprofit, the
Drupal Association, which is primarily funded through convention revenues and
memberships and pays for the project's tooling at drupal.org.