How to install Drupal CMS in 3 simple steps

Update: Try posting to the default Drupal site yourself

A step by step guide on Drupal CMS installation to a cheap hosting.

My www.symbianexample.com site is hosted on one of the best cheap hosting services T35.com. Featurewise it's provides every basic feature you can expect from just a "good cheap hosting": Apache, PHP, MySQL, CPanel, SSH and FTP access to your files - this is all Drupal needs to work (SSH is optional, but simplifies the installation).

The Drupal installation consists of three steps:
1. Download files
2. Create and initialize the database
3. Set up the configuration files

1. Download files

First of all we need a place to download to, some directory possibly linked to one of our domain names.
I have a www.symbianexample.com domain name linked to the symbianexample subdirectory of my account root directory.
We need to get Drupal archive from http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.6.3.tar.gz and unpack it into the target directory. We could just unpack everything to the local PC and transfer files to the web server via FTP. It will work, but faster and simpler is to download files directly t your host.

Here's how I did it.
a) Start Putty SSH client and log in to your account using the address from your hoster. Usually it's just your domain name

b) After login, navigate to the public_html. By the way note the symbianexample directory there. It's empty at the moment

c) Download files from drupal.org
wget http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.6.3.tar.gz


d) Unpack files to the directory drupal-4.6.3
tar -zxvf drupal-4.6.3.tar.gz


e) Move unpacked files to the target directory
mv drupal-4.6.3/* drupal-4.6.3/.htaccess ./symbianexample

Drupal files are now in the symbianexample directory

2. Create and initialize the database

Drupal stores its content in the database, that can be MySQL - the most frequent option in the hosting packages.

a) Create the database
The easiest way of creating the DB is via CPanel.
Log into it using the hoster's instructions. In T35's case you just open yourdomain.com:2082 in the browser.
E.g. http://www.symbianexample.com:2082

There go to Server -> MySQL Databases and create database sanktrum_symbian, user with the same name sanktrum_symbian and grant the user all the rights on the just created database

sanktrum is my account name and CPanel automatically adds it to the DB name, you will have a different prefix.

b) Load initial content into DB
In the CPanel go to Server -> PhpMyAdmin and select just created sanktrum_symbian from the drop-down box on the left. My DB shows (55) existing tables, because I uploaded the data already. Yours just created DB will show 0.


After selecting the DB, go to the SQL tab and upload the database.mysql file, supplied with the Drupal archive. You can can get it from the database directory of the Drupal installation (just FTP it to the local drive)
Hit Go and voila, DB is up and running

3. Configure the site

The last installation item is the simplest one.
Go to the sites/default directory and edit the configuration.php
You need to edit only two lines that specify the domain and database used. Replace the DB name, user name and password with the ones created on the step 2. And enter your domain name, of course.
$db_url = 'mysql://sanktrum_symbian:YourSuperPassword@localhost/sanktrum_symbian';
$base_url = 'http://www.symbianexample.com';

Create the administrator account

After the installation is completed, log into the just created site and do it fast. The first who creates an account, get's the administrator rights :)


That's it. Your Druapl installation is up and running, ready for the extra configurations via the Web interface. As I told already, the next thing I am going to do is to research the ways of uploading the image to the Drupal article while typing the article just like you can upload the images to Blogger. I am going to give everybody rights to post on the site so, that everybody could try and evaluate the possible solutions.

To be continued, stay tuned