Drupal installed on Dedicated Servers

Drupal as we all know that it is an open source CMS- Content Management System. This helps is making personal blogs to enterprise applications. It is free, flexible CMS written in PHP and distributed under GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for the websites. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to CMSs. Through this one can easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. This consists of different web sites, including community web portals, corporate web sites, social networking sites, personal web sites or blogs, and much more. This has built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules.

There are different Drupal Dedicated Web hosting requirements for running it necessarily requires the web server that can execute PHP scripts. Almost every Drupal site has different specific needs of setups and targeted traffic. The most recommended web server for Drupal is Apache, but Microsoft’s IIS is also considerable.

The installation is not quite trivial on dedicated servers, but you can find some good tutorials for Drupal 6 on the web. Many hosting companies offering dedicated and virtual private servers (VPS) offer Ubuntu as an option but one can get this on Linux as well as on Windows. Lets have a peek into how to install Drupal on dedicated server on Linux platform:

First step is to always try to understand the basic structure of the files ans try to understand how to configure each step while installing. Let’s say your Drupal core is located at my-drupal-core.com. Install Drupal there, this will be your master copy.

In ’sites’ folder, create a folder for each domain which you want to run off this core installation. Let’s say we have to make a Drupal site, based on this core, which will be drupal-slave.com. So, within your sites folder, create a drupal-slave.com folder. Generally, always try using a different database for each site. Then, create the database for the slave site, and then copy the settings.php file from your sites/default folder, alter it for your slave database, and put it into the drupal-slave.com folder. While you’re in there, create a files folder, you may need to change its permissions to 777.

So, your drupal-slave.com folder should look like this:

sites
   -- drupal-slave.com [folder]
    -- settings.php
      -- files [folder]
      -- modules [modules specific to this domain]
    -- themes [themes specific to this domain]

Now, on the server, every domain has a vhost.conf file, located inside a domains conf directory – this is at least how Red Hat does it. If you have a conf folder, but no vhost.conf file, go ahead and create it – you’ll likely have to login as root to execute this.

Now, within your vhost.conf file (for drupal-slave.com, in this scenario), you’ll need to do something like this (alter for your own needs):

DocumentRoot /httpd/vhosts/my-drupal-core.com/httpdocs<Directory /httpd/vhosts/my-drupal-core.com/httpdocs>
  php_admin_value open_basedir /tmp:/httpd/vhosts/my-drupal-core.com/httpdocs
  AllowOverride All
</Directory>

Then, (gracefully) restart Apache – viola! This works. The AllowOverride All is to allow the my-drupal-core.com’s .htaccess file to work on all slave sites. The /tmp directory allows the slave site to write to the tmp directory for file uploads. Hope this helps someone.

In this way, you can install the Drupal an Open Source CMS on dedicated web servers which is quite simple and very effective for managing your sites.

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