Before installing

The recommendations for Drupal 6 are:

  • Appache 1.3 or 2.X hosted on UNIX/Linux
  • MySQL 4.1 or 5.0
  • At least 3MB of disk space

More details about requirements you can find here: drupal.org/requirements

This installation description is written to install Drupal 6 at a hosting provider, but it works also for installing at your own server.

Download and unpack Drupal

First download Drupal here: drupal.org/project/drupal

And if you want a multi-language site, you also need to download the Drupal translation.

For example you can find the Dutch here: drupal.org/project/nl

Unpack the Drupal files and the translation files in a local directory on your computer.

Upload Drupal to your web server

Upload all files and directories, like includes, misc, modules etc to your hosting provider.

To upload your files you need a FTP client and the FTP account of your webserver.

In this description we will use FileZilla

Now you can choose if you like your website in a subdirectory, next to other website(s) or just in the root.

For example you can put everything in a drupal directory. So you can reach the Drupal site by using:

www.yourdomainname.com/drupal/

Creating Drupal database

To create the database depends on your situation. If you run the site at your hosting provider, you can find the information at their site.

Before we going to install Drupal we need to have:

  • The name of the database, for example _drupal
  • The username and password to access this database.
  • This user needs all privileges and the database is only locally accessible

If you have access to phpMyAdmin there is a very quick way to create the database and user:

  • Login to phpMyAdmin
  • Click on the Privileges tab.
  • Click here somewhere in the middle to “Add new User”
  • Fill in the desired User name: drupal
  • Select after host: local and localhost will be automatically filled in
  • Click on generate password and copy/paste/write down this password somewhere
  • Select: “Create database with same name and grant all privileges”
  • Behind Global privileges, click on “Check All”
  • Now click right under at “Now” to finish.

Now the database drupal is created with username drupal.

Multi-site Drupal?

If you like to install Drupal for 1 domain name, you can skip this paragraph and go to “Installing Drupal”.

But if you like to use your Drupal installation for more domain names, but using exactly the same database, you probably pointing 1 or more domain aliases to this Drupal directory. Later on we will come back on the point that you can have settings like “Site name” different for every domain name, but we still use the same database!

If you like to use the Drupal installation for more then 1 domain name and for every domain a different table/database, you have to go to “Drupal multi-site installation” instead of the next paragraph.

Installing Drupal

Now we are ready to install Drupal. Start a web browser and enter the address of your website

www.yourdomainname.com/drupal/install.php

  • Choose language: click on English and click on “Select language”, also when you like to have an another site language later on.
  • Fill in database name: drupal
  • Fill in database username: drupal
  • Fill in your database password
  • Click on “Save and continue”

Configuring the new site

If everything went ok, the database is initialized and you have the screen “Configure Site” in front of you.

  • Fill in all fields, the Username will be the main administrator account.
  • Check if the clean URLs is selected.
  • Click on “Save and continue”

In the next posts we are going to configure and add functionality to Drupal.