Change Drupal to DocumentRoot

I realize this reply is somewhat belated, but I'm hoping it'll be of use to someone.

I think I'm doing what you're trying to do - I'm running Drupal 6.9 on Fedora 8 / RPM install: I backported the RPMs to F8 (which isn't too awfully difficult; anyone wanting to know "how to", please let me know); I'm using PostgreSQL as a DB; I have multiple sites running off of the same codebase with a separate database for each; the default page for each domain I've "Drupal-ized" is the Drupal start page (which is what I understood you to be trying to do). Everything is working quite nicely; I currently have three sites that are "Drupalized"; when you go to any of them, you go directly to the Drupal page for that site.

The changes I had to make in order for everything to work were: in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf (I'm using "NameVirtualHost" and "VirtualHost"): add a default virtual host container - this'll work, you may want to be more specific wrt which interfaces it's listening on; if you're firewalled, it probably doesn't matter a whole lot:

<VirtualHost *:80>
   DocumentRoot /usr/share/drupal
</VirtualHost>

Then, in each VirtualHost container (the one for each site) I changed DocumentRoot to:

  /drupal                                                    for the primary site
  /usr/share/drupal/sites/example1.com   for the secondary, tertiary, etc. sites
  /usr/share/drupal/sites/example2.com     ...
     etc.

It'd make a bit more sense to have all sites in subdirectories beneath /usr/share/drupal/sites/ , but given the way things are packaged in the RPMs, the way I currently have it set up is by far the easiest way to set things up in reality. I'm toying with using the "primary site" as a template only and actually locating all production sites under /usr/share/drupal/sites/ ; that should work fine (albeit at the expense of a bit of disk space).

The second thing I had to change was .htaccess (/usr/share/drupal/.htaccess): for the primary site:

--- old/.htaccess  2009-02-07 11:18:08.506207099 -0500
+++ new/.htaccess  2009-02-07 11:20:06.815206632 -0500
@@ -81,8 +81,8 @@
   # To redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix,
   # (http://example.com/... will be redirected to http://www.example.com/...)
   # adapt and uncomment the following:
-  # RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
-  # RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
+  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
+  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
   #
   # To redirect all users to access the site WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix,
   # (http://www.example.com/... will be redirected to http://example.com/...)
@@ -94,7 +94,7 @@
   # VirtualDocumentRoot and the rewrite rules are not working properly.
   # For example if your site is at http://example.com/drupal uncomment and
   # modify the following line:
-  # RewriteBase /drupal
+  RewriteBase /drupal
   #
   # If your site is running in a VirtualDocumentRoot at http://example.com/,
   # uncomment the following line:

and, for the secondary, tertiary, quaternary, ... sites:

--- old/.htaccess  2009-02-07 11:18:08.506207099 -0500
+++ new/.htaccess  2009-02-08 11:15:35.686277229 -0500
@@ -81,8 +81,8 @@
   # To redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix,
   # (http://example.com/... will be redirected to http://www.example.com/...)
   # adapt and uncomment the following:
-  # RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
-  # RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
+  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
+  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
   #
   # To redirect all users to access the site WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix,
   # (http://www.example.com/... will be redirected to http://example.com/...)
@@ -94,7 +94,12 @@
   # VirtualDocumentRoot and the rewrite rules are not working properly.
   # For example if your site is at http://example.com/drupal uncomment and
   # modify the following line:
-  # RewriteBase /drupal
+  ## ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ##
+  ## LJM: Use '/drupal' for the primary site, '/drupal/sites/example1.com'  ##
+  ##    : for the secondary, '/drupal/sites/example2.com' for the tertiary, ##
+  ##    : and so on ...                                                     ##
+  ## ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ##
+  RewriteBase /drupal/sites/example1.com
   #
   # If your site is running in a VirtualDocumentRoot at http://example.com/,
   # uncomment the following line:

That was the best way I could think of to express the changes I had made to the .htaccess files, if it's not clear, please let me know and I'll try again.

One additional thing I noticed was that "Clean URLs" started working once I made the changed outlined above; prior to that, I had not been able to enable them for either site.

I'm pretty new to Drupal but I know my way around UNIX and Linux in general - Fedora in particular - and Apache, and PHP, ... Fortunately (for me) this turned out to be an exercise in Apache configuration && Linux system administration, and nothing too terribly Drupal specific.

Again, if anyone is interested in instructions for backporting the Drupal 6.9 RPMs to F8 or another RPM based system, my notes on getting 'multi-site' going, etc., please feel free to contact me or leave a follow-up post here.

- Larry