Installing Drupal on Windows

Last updated January 12, 2012. Created by jredding on November 13, 2010.
Edited by johnbarclay, becheung, kriskhaira, crazybutable. Log in to edit this page.

Installing Drupal 7

Installing Drupal on Microsoft Windows PCs

Quickstart Installation

In this section you will learn how to set up a local test site on your Windows PC. You need to do two things on your computer:

Install the software that Drupal needs in order to run
Install Drupal itself

You can use an installer that includes Drupal, the most popular being the Microsoft web installer.

Microsoft web installer/platform

The quickest and easiest way to install Drupal on a Windows platform is to use the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0.

Detailed guidance on this method is described in Installing Drupal on Microsoft.

Simply navigate to the Microsoft WebPlatform Installer 2.0 and click the Download button.

Note that the Drupal 6 version is actually Acquia Drupal, not a standard Drupal distribution. Acquia Drupal includes 30 very popular modules for building big sites. Acquia is only one of 118 different distributions of Drupal.

Download the Web Platform Installer, the front end for downloading and installing various other software components.
Click on the Web Platform tab to view the Frameworks and Runtimes subsection. Check the box next to PHP.
Under the Web Applications tab on the left, select Acquia Drupal. Click the Install button.
You will see a screen revealing everything that’s about to be installed. The Installer will grab any necessary component for you if it detects that one is missing from your selection, such as MySQL.
You will also see the Installation confirmation screen. Review the license terms of all the software components and click I Accept.
If you are installing MySQL, you will be prompted to enter a password for your root user. If MySQL was already installed, you will be prompted to enter your password to allow the Web PI to create your applications’ databases.
If prompted, restart your machine.
When the downloads and installations are complete, create your databases and database users for Drupal by filling in the form fields, which will save you time by not requiring you to update your databases and edit your configuration files manually.
Click through to the next screen to view a summary of what has been installed. Under the Drupal application will be a Launch link that will open your default web browser to the installation page (install.php for Drupal). From there you can launch Drupal.

Advanced Installation

Web Server

Drupal can be used with Microsoft Internet information Services (IIS) or with Apache/NGINX.

There are several resources that are available to you to get Drupal up and running on IIS. A search on the Drupal.org forums will usually pull up quite a number ofresources. Here are a few other resources you get started.

Installing Drupal on IIS7 and Vista

Drupal Install on Windows Server 2008 SP1 and IIS7

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSRV8-7ivUg

Here are a few resources on how to install Drupal onWindows Apache/NGINX:

Installing Apache (with PHP) on Windows XP (top of the page)

Installing Apache (with PHP) on Windows Vista (top of the page)

PHP

Drupal is written in the PHP scripting language. For support on how to install and use PHP on Microsoft’s IIS server, visit:

Installing Apache (with PHP) on Windows XP (bottom of the page)

Installing Apache (with PHP) on Windows Vista (bottom of the page)

Databases

Drupal 7 supports the MS database Microsoft SQL Server, see below. For Drupal 6 you'll want to use Mysql:

Installing MySQL on Windows

MySQL - how to install Drupal on MySQL.
Another blurb after - If you still can’t install, another way of getting Drupal up and running on windows is to use the Wamp platform (link out), which runs MySQL, Php, and d

Cron

Make a short php script that does a wget of your sites cron file
Use the windows task scheduler to run it regularly

Temp, Private, and Public Files

Make sure the file setting point to the windows temp directory and that IIS has write access to it. /tmp in unix is not the default temp directory on windows

WincCache

Make sure you are using the correct version of this and have resolved this issue: http://groups.drupal.org/node/25535#comment-654488

Xamp

If you want a quick set of instructions to follow, go to Simple install of Drupal on XAMPP. XAMPP from Apache Friends is the easiest way to get everything (Apache, PHP and MySQL) on a Windows machine (XP and Vista). It is installed in a few minutes and you can start developing right away.

Download XAMPP from Apache Friends at www.apachefriends.org/en/xampwindows.html.
Extract the XAMPP files to a drive by double-clicking the XAMPP self-extracting zip archive. In the Extract to: box, type C:\ (or click the button on the right to select your C:\ drive). Click the Extract button.
Once the files are extracted, open the extracted folder C:\xampp and run setup_xampp.bat.
Double-click the xampp_control.exe to open the XAMPP control panel.
Click the Start buttons next to both Apache and MySQL.
Test your XAMPP installation by opening the web browser and typing http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 in the address box.
Run XAMPP services (Apache or Drupal. Once the XAMPP page appears, go to the language section on the lefthand side under Sprachen and select English.
Go to Tools on the lefthand side and click on phpMyAdmin. Create a new database called Drupal: under MySQL Connection Collation, select utf8 unicode. Under Create New Database, type in Drupal.
Once you get the message “database drupal has been created”, close phpMyAdmin.
Set your password for MySQL for the “root” user. Open your web browser, go to http://localhost/security. Scroll down and select http://localhost/security/xamppsecurity.php. Once the security consoles opens, type in your password and click the Password Changing button.
Restart MySQL in the control panel by clicking the Stop butting next to MySQL, then the Start button again.
Extract Drupal files to the C:\xampp\htdocs folder. It would be easier for future use to rename the folder “Drupal”. Open the “Drupal” folder and copy the default.settings.php file to the same folder. Rename it settings.php. Open settings.php with Wordpad and type in $db_url = ‘mysql://root:admin@localhost.drupal’;. Then scroll down and enter $base_url = ‘http://localhost/drupal’;.
Install your Drupal site and configure.