Manually Downloading Module or Theme Files

Manually Downloading Module or Theme Files with Joe Shindelar In this tutorial, we'll learn how to manually download and upload a module or theme. By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to manually download a module or a theme and upload the files to your site. If the website or Drush methods for installing or updating a module or theme do not work, or if you're replacing a custom-written module or a theme, you'll need to use this process. Before you get started with this tutorial, you'll want to make sure that you know what modules are and how to find them. Where as if you're installing a theme that you know what themes are and how to find those. See the written version of this tutorial for links to each of these prerequisite tutorials. If you're installing a module or theme from drupal.org, follow the downloading instructions and then the uploading and unpacking instructions. If you created the module or theme, skip the downloading step. Instead, create an archive file that you know how to extract on the server and proceed with the steps in uploading and unpacking, using whatever method is appropriate for the way you initially created the archive file. Start by opening the project page for the module or theme you want to install on drupal.org, for example, the Admin Toolbar page, and scroll down to the download section, near the bottom of the page. Click on either the tar.gz or zip links to download the file to your computer. Next, navigate to the root directory for your project. If you're adding a new module or theme, create subdirectories in your top level modules and themes directories if they don't already exist. Typically people make a contrib subdirectory for contributed modules and themes that are downloaded from drupal.org and a custom subdirectory for modules and themes that are created. If you replace an existing module or a theme with an updated version, put the site into maintenance mode before doing this. And, if you're replacing an existing module or theme with an updated version, find and delete all the existing files and directories for the existing module or theme first. Modules are normally located in directories under the top level. Modules directory and themes are located under the top level themes directory. Upload or copy the files that you downloaded to your site. Place it in either the same location from what you deleted the directory, if you're replacing an existing module or theme with the appropriate subdirectory of modules or themes if adding a new module or theme then extract the file. After the file's been extracted, you can delete the archived version, if your extraction tool did not automatically delete it for you. You've now downloaded and unpacked the files required to install the new module. Once you've unpacked it, you can refer to the module or theme installation tutorials to complete the installation or update of the module or theme. Start at the step after the automatic download has been completed. In this tutorial, we looked at how modules and themes are organized within your project and then we walked through the process of manually downloading a file that contains the archive for the module or themes files, putting into the appropriate directory for your project and unpacking it, so that it can be installed.