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Before You Begin Installing Drupal

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  • 0:00
    [This series based on: Using Drupal - 2nd Edition, by Angela Byron and Addison Berry, with Bruno De Bondt]
  • 0:03
    [http://oreil.ly/19WDWOg]
  • 0:06
    [Drupalize.Me]
  • 0:11
    [Using Drupal - Installing and Upgrading Drupal - Before You Begin Installing Drupal]
  • 0:13
    [with Addison Berry]
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    [♪ music ♪]
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    In this short series, we're going to take a look
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    at the fundamentals of working with Drupal, which is to get it installed
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    and then keeping it up to date.
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    We'll actually walk through the installation process, and then we'll look at
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    how you can know if your site needs to be kept up to date
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    and then how to do that, both for core and contrib.
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    In this lesson, to get things started, we're going to get ourselves ready
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    for installation, by going through a few steps to prepare for that.
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    The first and most important one is gathering our requirements,
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    making sure that we actually have all the requirements in place
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    in order for us to do the installation.
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    This is mostly checking things on our web server to make sure that
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    we have the right software on the server.
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    After that, we'll actually need to download Drupal.
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    We need to get that source code, and then once we have the source code,
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    we're going to take a quick tour of the file and directory structure,
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    just so you understand what it is that you're installing.
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    So let's go ahead and get started by gathering the information and files that we need.
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    So before we actually install Drupal,
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    we want to make sure that we have our requirements in place.
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    So let's start off by going to drupal.org and looking at the requirements page for Drupal.
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    You can go to drupal.org/requirements as the URL,
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    or if you just go to drupal.org, you can navigate there
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    by going to Documentation and then looking at the Installation Guide.
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    The very first section of the Installation Guide is System Requirements.
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    And what we'll see here is the basic stuff we need.
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    So you need to have a web server somewhere where your site is going to live.
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    You do need a minimum amount of disk space.
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    This should be covered by most any server.
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    It doesn't require a whole lot of actual physical disk space.
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    The important pieces, though, here are these three: the web server,
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    the database, and PHP.
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    So for web server, you have to have some sort of web-server software.
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    Apache is the most popular, and it's the one most widely used in the community.
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    For database, you need to have—for Drupal 7, you're going to want MySQL 5 or higher,
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    with PDO, which most of the time you will have that.
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    And you can also use Postgres or SQLite.
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    Those are not as widely supported, though.
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    Most people in the community use MySQL or an equivalent of MySQL.
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    And then the last thing is PHP.
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    That's the code that is used to run Drupal.
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    And so, again, for Drupal 7 specifically, we want to have PHP 5.25 or higher.
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    Generally, people recommend using 5.3.
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    5.2 has actually been deprecated at this point, so most of your servers
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    should be upgrading to a minimum of 5.3 anyway.
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    But these are the three basic components you have to have
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    on that web server that you're going to run Drupal on.
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    Once you have a web server with those pieces in place,
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    if you're using some—like a web host that is providing this for you—
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    not uncommon—you need to make sure that you have your
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    FTP or SSH information, because you're going to need to put the Drupal files
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    onto the actual web server.
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    So whatever you need to connect for that, you should have that information.
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    Or if you're using a local host, you just need to know where
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    on your local computer you would be putting those files for your web root.
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    The other thing you need is database server credentials.
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    So you need the username, password, and a database name
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    so that Drupal can actually connect to the database.
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    You're going to have to create a database for Drupal to use.
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    So either someone will have created that for you already, and they
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    can give you that username, password, and database connection information.
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    Or you would need to create it yourself and then make sure
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    you write down and remember that information.
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    Drupal's installation process will not create a brand new database for you.
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    You need to create an empty database, and then the Drupal installation
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    process will fill the database for you as you proceed.
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    And if you do want to have your own local—so you can install
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    the web server on your local computer that's not necessarily run by a web host,
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    so that you can play around and experiment with things.
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    There are a couple of different options out there.
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    So there's XAMP, which is cross-platform,
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    so you can get that for Linux, Windows, and Mac.
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    For Mac-specific, there is also MAMP, which is at mamp.info.
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    And then there's also WampServer, which is for Windows,
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    Apache, MySQL, PHP.
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    The community as a whole uses the AMP stack,
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    Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and that's the assumption that
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    you'll be running with as you work through these lessons.
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    For actually installing Drupal, we're going to grab that from drupal.org as well.
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    Now you should—if you're working through the Using Drupal series of lessons,
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    you should be using the source code that we provide,
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    and there's already a lesson on that in the Preface series,
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    or the About the Using Drupal series, that shows you how to use
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    the source code that we provide with the book.
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    In this lesson, I'm going to walk through how you install
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    brand new Drupal that's downloaded from drupal.org,
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    instead of the installation profile stuff that we've provided.
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    So when you go to drupal.org, there's a big Get Started with Drupal button.
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    You can click on that, or you can also go to Download and Extend.
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    But we'll just do the Get Started with Drupal.
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    And you can see Download Drupal, and it will have the latest version,
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    which right now, at the time of this lesson, is 7.22. I'll click that.
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    And instead of actually starting a download, this takes me to the Drupal core project page
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    on drupal.org, and if I scroll down, you'll see, these are the downloads
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    that are available to me, and I can read the release notes on it, etcetera.
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    I can look at issues. But these are the download links right here.
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    So there's a tarball, a tar.gz file, and a Zip file.
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    Download whichever one you like or prefer or need for your operating system.
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    But you want to download a copy of this, and then once you get that,
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    you're going to need to put it into your web server,
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    wherever your website is supposed to live.
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    So if you are doing it on your local computer,
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    then you need to put it into the right directory on your computer.
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    And if you're using a web host, you need to make sure you SFTP
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    or SSH, and put those files into the right place for the website to function.
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    I'm going to go ahead and download this onto my local computer,
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    because I have a local development environment here.
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    And then we'll take a look at what we've downloaded.
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    So now I'm going to switch over to where I've downloaded this file.
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    And it's here, drupal-7.22.zip. I got the Zip file.
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    I'm going to go ahead and open that up,
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    unzip it, whatever software you need to use in your operating system.
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    And it creates this folder, Drupal-7.22.
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    I can change the name of this folder. It's not going to hurt anything.
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    So if I wanted to just change it to Drupal or D7 or Drupal7,
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    whatever you want to name this folder is fine.
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    If you are just using these files on a web root,
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    you probably won't want this folder at all. You just want the contents of it.
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    This is actually Drupal, all of these files here.
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    The important pieces to be looking at here
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    are the files that we need for installation and update,
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    as well as the sites directory, which is a very important folder in your Drupal installation.
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    So the install.php and update.php files are the two scripts
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    that actually do the work of installing and updating, respectively.
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    Because they're located in this top-level folder,
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    this is called the Drupal root.
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    So you can see we have install and update.
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    This is your Drupal root folder, and that's how people will refer to it.
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    You can access either of those directly in your browser
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    by going to whatever the web address for your Drupal site is,
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    slash, for instance, install.php or update.php.
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    You can type it directly into the URL, and you'll go to that file
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    and run the scripts there.
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    In addition to those actual scripts that end with .php,
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    there are two text files, one for each, install.txt and upgrade.txt,
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    that have instructions and more information on what those scripts are used for.
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    Now most first-time Drupal administrators are going to take a look
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    at these directories and put contributed and custom modules and themes
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    into the modules and themes directories. That makes sense.
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    There's modules, there's themes, if I get a new one.
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    You would think that would be where you would place them.
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    They will actually work there, but it's really not a best practice.
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    It's going to create a lot of problems, because if you
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    overwrite those directories, when you do an update of Drupal,
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    you could lose all of the stuff that you put in there.
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    The best practice is to keep all of your site's specific contributed and custom code
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    in the sites directory.
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    So this directory here, sites.
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    And unless you're using something called a multisite installation,
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    which we'll look at in a couple of minutes,
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    you should put all of your modules and themes inside directories inside sites.
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    So I would go into my sites, all, and I have modules and themes here.
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    And that's where I would actually put all of my contributed and custom modules and themes
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    for my Drupal site, in that location.
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    So this way it's easy; you can isolate the sites folder whenever you do an upgrade
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    and not change anything else, and let Drupal core update everything
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    it needs to without a risk of overwriting the files that you want to keep in there
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    that are specific to your site.
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    Now a minute ago, I referred to something called a multisite installation.
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    And Drupal has the capacity to run multiple sites from one Drupal code base.
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    So you can have one set of code, this code that we're looking at now.
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    But you can actually run multiple websites with different domain names
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    from just that one bit of source code.
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    And in the Drupal world, we call that multisite.
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    So actually the example websites that we have for usingdrupal.com
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    are using this multisite feature to run,
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    so that we have a domain name like jumpstart.usingdrupal.com.
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    They all are running from that same code base.
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    We only have one set of code, and then each site has its own individual database.
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    So the way that you would set that up—
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    I'm not going to go into great detail, but I just want to give you some
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    of the basics so that you understand what might be involved
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    if you're interested in doing something like that.
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    Because this is going to involve a little bit of web server configuration,
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    in terms of you need to set things up for Apache to understand
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    what it should be doing.
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    So what you need to do is first let Apache or your web server
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    know that whatever different domain names you want
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    to use should point to this particular directory.
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    So even if I have five different sites with five different domain names,
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    they all need to point to just this one folder of Drupal.
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    And I'll just show you a real quick example of what that looks like.
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    Here is what we call the vhost file for usingdrupal.com.
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    You'll notice in the ServerAlias—
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    so the server name itself is using drupal.com.
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    But under ServerAlias, we have this usingdrupal.com with an asterisk in the front.
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    So that means that anything that is a subdomain there of usingdrupal—
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    I could list out each individual one that we're using.
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    Since we have multiple, I just put an asterisk as a wildcard,
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    say anything with a subdomain should also point to this same directory
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    that the main usingdrupal.com domain name is pointing at.
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    And that directory is this document root.
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    And so this is where it's living on my server.
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    So you need to set up your virtual host to make sure that the web server points
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    to the directory that you need, and then all you need to do
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    in your Drupal installation is have—each of those sites gets
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    its own little directory inside of your sites folder.
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    So let's take a look at what that looks like.
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    So here is my Drupal root on the usingdrupal.com site.
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    And you can see, so we have the all, which has modules and themes
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    like we were looking at, and if you just have a single site,
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    that's all you really need to use, and the default is where your settings.php file is.
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    But then you can see I have—for each of our subdomains,
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    there's a different folder, and each of these can have
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    its own files settings, and it can have its own modules and themes folders,
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    if I want to limit what it can choose from only there.
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    So there's a lot more information about multisite on drupal.org,
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    and so you can investigate that more if you want to.
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    It is a capability that Drupal has.
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    Honestly, there aren't a whole lot of use cases where it makes a lot of sense
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    to use it, but you should know that it's there, because if you
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    do need it, it's a really, really handy thing to be able to implement.
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    Also, in Drupal 7, there's now an Advanced feature that allows you
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    to create aliases for multisite installation directories.
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    So this would let you map one or more arbitrary site names that would be used
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    in a URL to a specific configuration folder.
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    So hopefully you have a sense of the requirements that you
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    need, and make sure that you get your basic web server requirements set up.
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    We've downloaded Drupal and looked at the important files and
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    folders that we'll mostly be working with when we're working with Drupal.
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    And then we had a quick review of a pretty nifty feature called
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    multisite, which most of the time you won't need,
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    but if you do need it, it's a very handy thing to know about.
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    So now that we have everything in place,
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    we're ready to actually begin installation of Drupal.
  • 15:05
    [Drupalize.Me]
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    [Based on the book Using Drupal, 2nd Edition, by Angela Byron, Addison Berry, and Bruno de Bondt]
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    [Excerpts from the book used with permission of O'Reilly Media, Inc., which owns or controls all rights to publish and sell the same]
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    [O'Reilly®]

Using Drupal Appendix A: Installing and Upgrading Drupal

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Before You Begin Installing Drupal

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15 minutes 14 seconds // Drupal 7 // HDCC //

Prior to installing Drupal, it’s important to make sure that you can actually do so, and understand a bit about how Drupal is structured. The first lesson provides a checklist of Drupal’s requirements, and also highlights important things in the Drupal file structure that are worth knowing before diving into the installation process. We also explain and take a quick look at how you can use Drupal to run multiple sites from the code base, known in Drupal as a multisite installation.

Additional resources: 

Using Drupal, 2nd edition

Drupal installation requirements

XAMPP cross-platform web server

WampServer for Windows

MAMP for Mac

Drupalize.Me Guide: Using Drupal Book by O'Reilly Media

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