Drupal CMS instant install

The default Drupal CMS install now completes instantly on Drupal Forge. Drupal Forge provides a full preview of the Drupal CMS product. That means when you click the application URL in the Express Launch widget, it presents the Drupal CMS installer, not a fully functional site. The default install starts if you do not select any extra content types.

Due to HTTP latency, the installer progress bar on Drupal Forge used to take up to five minutes to complete the default Drupal CMS install. Locally the default install took less than a minute. We found a way to pre-apply the default recipe. That allows the installer to run much faster. You can see how we do it in our Starshot repository. Our repository works with DDEV, so you can also try it locally.

If you select the default install, it installs your site instantly without showing you the progress bar. If you add all the optional content types, it takes four and a half minutes. We should be able to reduce that by removing operations that are handled by the default recipe.

Our improvements to the installer not only speed up installation on Drupal Forge, they also enable the Drupal CMS installer to recover from timeouts and other failures. They are now officially part of Drupal CMS.