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Setting up cron is an important step in building a website and helps maintain site resources for search indexing, checking for core and module updates, and clearing temporary files.
A properly configured cron job manages many tasks:
Drupal 8 provides the Automated Cron module.
We can find this core module in core/modules/automatic_cron.
Compared to Drupal 7
Drupal 7 already had an "automated cron system," but Drupal 8 moved it into a separate module so that sites not using it wouldn’t incur any overhead.
Extend your Drupal 8 site's functionality with additional modules, or change its appearance with additional themes.
This documentation guide describes how to "Extend" your Drupal 8 site beyond the capabilities of the standard Drupal core installation.
Now that you’ve finished installing Drupal 8, you can add additional functionality to your site by installing modules, or customize the look and feel by installing themes.
The standard Drupal core installation has limited features and looks fairly plain. However, Drupal is designed to be modular, making it easy to extend with additional modules and themes.
Install one or more modules to modify, extend, or enhance Drupal with additional functionality.
Composer is a PHP package manager. It provides functionality similar to Drupal’s native dependency management and Drush make, but for any project—not just Drupal modules. Many Drupal 8 modules depend on generic PHP packages that must be included in the site’s codebase using Composer.
Which modules have Composer dependencies?
There are several ways to determine if a module has Composer dependencies:
In addition to installing modules via the user interface, you can also download and install modules from the command line:
The recommended method for installing themes is via Composer.
Drupal 8 places all core themes in a directory named /core/themes, and all contributed or custom themes in a directory named /themes (in the webroot). Check the detailed contents of the README.txt file in the /themes directory for more information.
Most contributed modules receive periodic updates that fix security issues, resolve functionality problems, add new features, or all three. It is recommended to regularly check for new versions of the modules you use and update them as new releases become available.
The module update process is well described in the User Guide — read Chapter 13.6: “Updating a Module”.