Step 1: Download and extract Drupal

Last updated March 12, 2013. Created by dellintosh on April 25, 2008.
Edited by mathwal, batigolix, jbarchuk, arianek. Log in to edit this page.

Drupal is available in two supported versions (the most recent and the previous). The "recommended release" is the latest stable release of that version. To learn more about versions, see the Drupal version information page.

If you would like to create a Drupal site in a language other than English, information about Drupal translations is available at http://drupal.org/project/translations.

Downloading Drupal

Before you begin, log into your server and navigate to the directory from which you will be serving your Drupal site. On many *nix computers the path from the server's root will be /var/www/html, so cd /var/www/html. On a shared server, or a server that hosts multiple domains, the path will be different (try cd ~/www or cd ~/public_html). If you are unsure of the directory, ask your hosting provider for assistance.

Download Drupal using any download utility, the two most popular of which are wget and curl. Not every computer has both. The commands are, respectively:

wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-x.x.tar.gz
or
curl -O http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-x.x.tar.gz

(Note that the option for the curl command is the upper case letter "O" and not the numeral that stands for zero.)

(Replace the "http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-x.x.tar.gz" string with the link for the version you will be installing.)

Extracting Drupal

Type the following command (replacing "x.x" with your downloaded version's number):

tar -xzvf drupal-x.x.tar.gz

Remove the compressed version of the file by typing rm drupal-x.x.tar.gz.

Moving Drupal to its intended location

Now you need to move the contents of the drupal-x.x directory one level "up" into the web server's document root or your public HTML directory:

mv drupal-x.x/* drupal-x.x/.htaccess ./

For Drupal 7 also add mv drupal-x.x/.gitignore ./

The files from the directory you downloaded and decompressed have now been moved up a level into your web directory, and you can delete the drupal-x.x directory (which is now empty):

rmdir drupal-x.x

Before continuing to the next page ...

The base URL for your Drupal installation will be set in your web server's configuration file. You will need to know this URL before proceeding to the next steps of the installation. If you are installing Drupal on your local machine the base URL may be: http://localhost. If you are installing Drupal to a web server your base URL may be a specific domain name (such as http://example.com).