Installing and Configuring Drupal 6.1

By Michael J. Ross
2008-03-24


Installing Drupal

Open the installation file that you saved, which should start up whatever file archive application is associated with Gzip files.

Extract the contents of the archive file into a new directory somewhere within your Web server's root directory. You can name it simply "Drupal". The contents consist of more than 400 files in more than 50 directories. This may seem like a lot, to anyone new to CMSs, but is actually a fraction of what is required by other leading CMSs. Drupal is also efficient in disk space usage compared to its rivals, using well under four megabytes.

Create a database for Drupal on your MySQL server. You can use any MySQL database management tool, such as phpMyAdmin. Alternatively, use MySQL's built-in monitor program, at the command line:

mysql --password --user=root

After you login, you will see a welcome banner and a command prompt:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 4
Server version:  5.0.51a-community-nt MySQL Community Edition (GPL)
Type 'help;' or '\h' for help.  Type '\c' to clear the buffer.
mysql>

Enter the commands to create a database (in this example, named "drupal_db") and also create a database user ("drupal_user"), with a password and all privileges in the database:

CREATE DATABASE drupal_db;
GRANT ALL ON drupal_db.* TO drupal_user@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

(Of course, the weak password used in this example is for illustrative purposes only, and should never be used for any non-development Drupal installation.)

Within your Web browser of choice, go to your new Drupal homepage, index.php. For instance, if you placed the Drupal installation directory within your Apache root directory, then you would go to http://localhost/Drupal/index.php, or, if you have set your Apache server to search for index.php files as default files, then http://localhost/Drupal/ would be sufficient. The index.php file detects that Drupal has yet to be installed, and automatically forwards you to the installation page, at http://localhost/Drupal/install.php?profile=default (continuing with our example), shown below.

Most people will choose to use English, which is what we will do in this tutorial. Then the installation script shows you the database configuration options.

In the figure above, it is clear from the checklist on the left that we have gone from the first step (choosing a language) directly to the third. Drupal presumably verified that a MySQL server is running and is compatible with Drupal 6.1.

Type in the values you had chosen earlier for your database name, username, and password. If you want to change the server name from its default ("localhost"), or set a port number, or assign a table prefix, then click the "Advanced options" link. We will not be changing any of those default values in this tutorial.

Assuming that all of the prior steps have been completed successfully, then the installation of the Drupal files will continue until it is finished. The two figures above and below present screens that may be visible momentarily during this process.

After the file installation is completely done, you can begin the initial configuration of your new site.

Tutorial Pages:
» Installing and Configuring Drupal 6.1
» Drupal
» System Requirements
» Downloading Drupal
» Installing Drupal
» Configuring Drupal
» Administering Drupal
» Basic Site Customization
» More Resources

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