Drupal an amazing CMS Part 2 – Installation
In the last post I gave you some introduction about Drupal and its application. In this post we will understand the drupal installation, system requirements, environment set up etc.
Drupal as you all know runs in a PHP/Mysql environment, so before installing drupal, we must have PHP, Apache (webserver), and mysql database installed and running on the machine.
All these can be run on both linux and windows with ease and have a one click installer available for various linux and windows versions. I will cover the installation on windows machine but the same instructions are valid for linux as well.
First of all you must download XAMPP which is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.
1. Download the XAMPP .exe installer for windows from here.
2. Install it in a directory xampp under C drive. You will see that under xampp foldere there are many files and folder.
3. Double click the file name xampp-control.exe to start the mysql/apache as a service. Following control panel will open showing the status of various services. You can start/stop it from the control panel.
4. Once you have xampp installed, you can check if everything is working fine by opening http://127.0.0.1 or http://localhost
You should see xampp splash page if everything is installed correctly.
Once the environment is set, we should now move on to drupal installation.
1. Download the latest version from drupal.org
We will be installing drupal 6.15 for this tutorial purpose. Download and extract the content of the file in a folder named drupal under c:/xampp/htdocs as shown in image below.
2. Open the following url http://127.0.0.1/drupal which will open the installation page. Select the english installation option.
3. You should run into the following error which needs to be rectified before the installation process. Just copy the default.settings.php to settings.php, change the permissions and try again.
4. Create database e.g. drupal615 by opening http://127.0.0.1/phpmyadmin which is a php application GUI for managing databases. Create the database as per the image below.
5. Add database name e.g. drupal615 in our case, database username which is root for default xampp installation and keep password empty. If you have your own mysql installation and if you have set user/password different then you must provide them in order to proceed. Leave advanced options as it is for default xampp installation. Save and continue.
5. If everything is fine you should see the configure site page with instructions to fill the
email address : e.g. contact@mydomain.com
site name: e.g. drupal
both of which can be changed later as well.
Create a user name say admin and add password, select the time zone and save/continue.
6. Your drupal installation is finished, you should some error messages regarding email which you can ignore for now as smtp server is not running by default which results in email failure. You can now view your new drupal site here.
7. Your drupal site is ready for customization.
So this is the procedure for drupal installation which can be done in less than 10 minutes if we have all the software downloaded and installed on the machine.
In my next post I will walk you through the admin panel, drupal features like modules, themes, blocks etc which will help you to understand the basic drupal functionality.
Lokesh Gupta
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