Multisite Drupal - How to install a new site | luciano de falco alfano website

Multisite Drupal - How to install a new site

Introduction

Drupal allows to install multiple web sites using a single instance of the code. This capability was introduced in the core of the system since version 6 (at the time of writing this note, the stable version of Drupal is 7).

This article summarizes the steps necessary to install an additional web site on a server already running Drupal multisite. And is derived from the procedure showed in Drupal documentation.

I would assume that:

The server is Linux CentOS, or equivalent; if not, in the following examples you suitable cd commands to the file system of your distribution;
you are able to give commands to the server using shell, and that you can connect via telnet or ssh with an administration account;
The server uses Apache as httpd service ;
The DBMS is MySQL, and you know its administration username and password.

The examples are based on the following parameters:

IP address of the server host: xx.yy.zz.ttt;
Http service port on server host: 80;
Drupal installation directory /webroot/drupal;
Installation directory sites (Drupal default): /webroot/drupal/sites/;
Site directory to install /webroot/drupal/sites/esempio.com;
File with the basic configuration of the httpd service: /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf;
File with the configuration of the virtual hosts served by httpd: /etc/httpd/conf/httpd-hosts.conf;
Data base administrator: root;
Database, WEB Site DB name: esempio_db;
Database, WEB Site DB user name: esempio_usr;
Database, WEB Site DB user password: esempio_pwd.

As you can see, I prefer to have two files in the Apache configuration directory /etc/httpd/conf/. The httpd.conf file contains base parameters configuring Apache. While the httpd-hosts.conf contains virtual hosts sites configurations. The httpd-hosts.conf is included in the file httpd.conf using an include directive, such as the following line:

Include "/etc/httpd/conf/httpd-vhosts.conf"

Again, if you want to use some of the following examples to your Drupal installation, be careful to use consistently the directories names of your your installation directories.

Logic

We are going to do the following steps:

Create the directory of the site and copiandoci the initial configuration file settings.php
Configure the http service to serve the new site as a virtual host;
Optional: modify the hosts file on a client machine to reach the server;
Create the database for the site and the user that uses it;
Run from browser http://sito/install.php, this will change the settings.php entering the values necessary for the operation of the new site.

Procedure

Create the directory Site

[root@host ~] # cd /webroot/drupal/sites/
[root@host sites] # mkdir esempio.com
[root@host sites] # cp default/settings.php  esempio.com/settings.php
[root@host sites] # chown-R apache:apache esempio.com/

Configure the virtual host for the site

Make a backup copy of the file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd-hosts.conf ¹, for example:

[root@host sites] # cd /etc/httpd/conf
[root@host conf] # cp httpd-vhosts.conf httpd-vhosts-121228.conf

After that, you edit httpd-hosts.conf using a text editor to add the following section:

<VirtualHost Xx.yy.zz.ttt:80>
  DocumentRoot "/webroot/drupal"
  ServerName www.esempio.com
  CustomLog "logs/www.esempio.com.access.log" combined
  ErrorLog "logs/www.esempio.com.error.log"
  <Directory "/webroot/drupal">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow, deny
    Allow from all
  </ Directory>
</ VirtualHost>

Then restart the service:

[root@host sites] # service httpd restart
Stopping httpd:                             [OK]
Starting httpd:                             [OK]

(Optional) Enter server address in `hosts` file

This task is required if the new site isn't added yet to a public DNS, but you should use it (see the next step: run http://www.esempio.com/install.php).

If you are using a Windows PC with the operating system installed in c:\windows\, you will need to edit the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file by adding the line:

xx.yy.zz.ttt www.esempio.com

Create the database for the site and the related user

Now we need to create a database used by the new site, and the user needed by Drupal to use it. We use the mysqladmin program to create the database, presenting us as MySQL administrators:

[root@host sites] # mysqladmin -u root -p create esempio_db
Enter password:

After that we create the user using the mysql program. Again, presenting us as MySQL administrators:

[root@host sites] # mysql -u root -p
Enter password:
Welcome to ...
mysql> create user 'esempio_usr' @ '%' IDENTIFIED BY 'esempio_pwd';
mysql> grant select, insert, update, delete, create, drop, index, alter, create temporary tables, lock tables on esempio_db. * to 'esempio_usr' @ '%' IDENTIFIED BY 'esempio_pwd';
mysql> create user 'esempio_usr' @ 'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'esempio_pwd';
mysql> grant select, insert, update, delete, create, drop, index, alter, create temporary tables, lock tables on esempio_db. * to 'esempio_usr' @ 'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'esempio_pwd';
mysql> exit

As you can see we have configured the user esempio_usr to work both in connection remotely from every IP address (@'%'), either locally to the server (@'localhost').

Do `http://www.esempio.com/install.php`

Using a web browser we go to http://www.esempio.com/install.php and answer to the program questions. The program install.php should be used only once, and, based on your answers, it adjusts appropiatly the configuration file of the new Drupal site.

Among other things, this program creates an account for the administration of the site, asking us for name, email and password we want to use. Keep in touch these credentials. If we lost them, will be hart to administer the the site ...

References

Remember: this file is included in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf using the directive:

Include "/etc/httpd/conf/httpd-vhosts.conf" ↩