Recently I quit working at the company I had been with for 7 years and decided to become self-employed. This, as it turns out, gives me quite a bit of free time... so I decided to migrate my very simple Drupal 7 website to Drupal 8.
Hosting Drupal 8
Before I could start the migration I had to get Drupal 8 running on the server. This did not go easily. Both the hosting company that I use, DreamHost, as well as Drupal 8 and Drush's insistance on using composer are to blame.
Composer's memory usage is crazy. It seems to easily use up to 1.5GB of memory if you let it do its thing. Shared hosting never gives you this much memory so having a Drupal 8 website actually got more expensive than having a Drupal 7 one. On DreamHost the PHP memory limit is 90MB as far as I can tell, I even had them up it temporarily to 512MB but my composer process would get killed time after time.
After 1 day of stop-motioning my way through a Drupal 8 install I opted for DreamHost's more expensive Virtual Private Server (VPS). I suppose they are happy.
Migrating to Drupal 8
The migration didn't go smoothly. I tried it with the built-in drupal_migration, drupal_upgrade and drupal_tools modules but it gave me errors with url aliases and comment bundles... but I didn't care too much. I do also notice that I have duplicate text formats because Drupal 8 has CKEditor turned on by default. I tried disabling the text formats that I assume got migrated but now I can't change anything to the left-over CKEditor ones because it complains about a "Full HTML" text format already existing and two text formats can't have the same name... whatever. I'll maybe do another migration to figure that out, I don't care too much yet.
Starting a theme
Other than that I did a very simple theme. I am not a front-end developer so this took me two days. Mainly because I had never started a theme from scratch and also because I have only little CSS knowledge.
But here we are, all fresh and up to date. Let 2019 begin!