This article takes you through how to install or set up a Drupal website on the internet.
Step 1: Download and install Drupal 7. To begin, download Drupal: Grab a copy of Drupal 6 from the official Drupal website if you haven't done so already and unpack the compressed file named something like drupal-6-x.tar.gz (which is a file type similar to ZIP files). You should see a folder containing the Drupal 7 files and folders.
Do not alter any of the Drupal folders and files except for the contents of the sites folder (which lets you store your modules and themes). Altering core files affects updates and maintenance, not to mention your sanity when things go wrong.
You will also want to read:
A Basic Guide to Drupal Website Managemen
Drupal Website Maintenance tutorial
Drupal Website Security Tutorial
How to Speed Up Your Drupal Website
How to address "failed Drupal Clean url Test"
Open the sites folder.
You'll see two subfolders: all and default. The all folder lets you share modules and themes across more than one Drupal site. The default folder is where Drupal retains your site settings and its files. A powerful feature of Drupal is the ability to run multiple websites from the same core files, known as Drupal Multi-sites. This article steps you through setting up a single Drupal site.
Create a duplicate of the default.settings.php file in the /sites/default folder and rename the copy to settings.php; be sure you allow the settings.php file to be writeable on your server.
Drupal will set the file permissions back to read-only once the installation is done.
Sites folder with the sites/default/settings.php file
You will also want to read:
A Basic Guide to Drupal Website Managemen
Drupal Website Maintenance tutorial
Drupal Website Security Tutorial
How to Speed Up Your Drupal Website
How to address "failed Drupal Clean url Test"
Installing Drupal
Drupal, like all software, has minimum requirements to run properly. Make sure your web server is running the following:
PHP: Version 5 is strongly recommended with at least 64MB of memory for PHP scripts.
An empty database (MySQL or PostgreSQL): Create an empty database with its own user name and password.
Apache or similar for web serving: Clean URLs is a feature that uses mod_rewrite on the server, so Apache is recommended.
When your system meets all requirements, you are ready to install Drupal:
Upload or copy the Drupal files to your web server. Make sure you uploaded the (hidden) file .htaccess before you run the installer.
The .htaccess file is required to enable clean URLs on your website.
When your Drupal files are copied to your web server, and you have a blank database to use, open the install.php page in a web browser.
When you see the blue Drupal install screen, start the install process by clicking Install Drupal in English. Drupal has translation packs so a Drupal site is not limited to just English. Follow the quick installation process below.
Note: If you visit the install.php page and receive an error, or don't see anything on the page, then copy the files to your web server again and check your web server setup.
Enter the site database info (database name and user). By default Drupal will look on the server localhost for the database, but if your server or host does not use localhost then you will need to enter the hostname or port number pointing to your MySQL server.
Drupal will install the site database and provide you with a form to enter basic site info as well as your main administration account. Again, if you do not upload the .htaccess file that comes with Drupal, then you cannot enable Clean URLs for your site. Clean URLs provide the ability to choose a custom URL for content, so you could have /about and not /about.php appear in the browser address bar (which has become common on the web and offers the advantage of being search engine friendly).
When you arrive at the default screen of a fresh Drupal site, you see some instructions regarding your next steps but you can ignore that text if you wish and continue to configure your Drupal website
You will also want to read:
A Basic Guide to Drupal Website Managemen
Drupal Website Maintenance tutorial
Drupal Website Security Tutorial
How to Speed Up Your Drupal Website
How to address "failed Drupal Clean url Test"
More Detailed Step-by-Step Manual Installation
In this article, we will show you how to install a Drupal website manually.
1) Download a zip copy of Drupal from their official website, here.
2) Login to the control panel of your website.
3) Go to the Manage Databases & Users section by clicking the link found in the Databases section.
4) Enter a database name, then click Create Database, create a user and add the user to the database.
5) Enter a username and password for this database, then click Finish
Note: Make sure you copy the user, database name and password you used because you will need them later.
6) Under the Website Tools section of the left menu, click File Manager, then open the File Manager
7) Click the Upload option found at the top of the file manager
8) Locate the zip file we downloaded in Step 1 and set permissions to 755. Once the download is finished, you will see a completed in the progress bar located in the bottom left.
drupal_install_4
9) Back in the normal view of the file manager, click the file we just uploaded and click Extract.
10) Click Extract Files
11) Click the zip file once again, and delete it. Make sure its the zip and not the folder that was just extracted.
12) Go inside of the folder we just extracted and select all, from there, click Move File
13) Change the path at the bottom to reflect where you want to install Drupal, in this example, we are installing it at the base of our domain, so we will simply put public_html. Once the path is entered, click Move Files.
14) Now move back up one level and click the folder we extracted again. Once it is selected, click delete.
15) Now browse to your website, you should see an install wizard, follow through all the steps.
Once you get to the Database section, select MySQL and enter the database info we saved from step 5.
Continue through the rest of the steps filling in relevant details.
That’s it! You now know how to install Drupal manaually.
You will also want to read:
A Basic Guide to Drupal Website Managemen
Drupal Website Maintenance tutorial
Drupal Website Security Tutorial
How to Speed Up Your Drupal Website
How to address "failed Drupal Clean url Test"
How to install a module in Drupal
The default Drupal installation come with many useful modules, and there is a brief description of what each one of the modules does. If you need more modules, you can freely download them from the Drupal Modules official website.
When you install a new Drupal website, you have the modules stored in the modules subfolder within the Drupal installation directory. You can install additional modules by simply unzipping them in that folder. Alternatively, you can use the Install new module functionality.
The process is simple. Visit the Drupal Modules website and find the module you wish to install. Download the corresponding version to your local hard-drive. Then upload the archive in the modules folder of your Drupal installation and extract it.
Make sure its dependencies are enabled. Then enable the module and save the new configuration.
That is all you need to do to install a new Drupal module.
How to Uninstall a Module in Drupal
We will use the Devel module as an example to show you how to uninstall a module in Drupal 7. Devel is very useful for developing a site, but should be uninstalled before going live.
Step #1. Uninstalling the module
Go to the Modules screen and click Uninstall in the top-right corner.
Here you'll see a list of modules that can be uninstalled:
You will notice that the Devel module is not on the list. If you don't see the module you want to remove in this list, go back the Modules page and disable the module.
Sometimes, if the module consists of multiple parts, you may need to disable several parts. In this case, you'll need to disable Devel generate and then Devel generate:
Now you will click Uninstall again and Devel is available to uninstall.
Check the box for the module you want to uninstall. As with disabling the module, you may need to uninstall one before you uninistall the others.
Click Uninstall.
Click Uninstall again to confirm you really want to delete it.
Step #2. Deleting the files
The process in Step 1 uninstalls the modules, but doesn't delete the files.
To fully remove a module, you will need login to your site's files and browse to /sites/all/modules/ to delete the files
Most ordinary Drupal users manage their Drupal website and do everything through the admin interface. They install modules via the "Install new modules" link.
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