Multi-site on Windows

For those who've never edited their hosts file, here's how you get permission to do so in Vista: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923947.

"Find the Apache httpd.conf file ... Sorry, I can't remember where Xampp installs this, but it will be in the Apache folder."

On my Windows Vista machine I found it in xampp/apache/conf/httpd.conf . The required line was already active, so no change was needed.

Cheerily Yours,
Tim O'Laguna

Former Commodore 64 Junior Wizard

You can also have only one database with different tables for each multi-site.
In step 1.3 above, create only one database.
Ignore step 2.2 and 2.3, leave the settings.php as is.
and in step 5, when you start a new site, you will be asked to enter the database name, user name and password. Enter the same database information you created in step 1.3 for every site.
Click on Advanced settings and enter a table prefix such as "site1_" or "site2_".<<< this is important!

That's it.

All the Drupal tables will be recreated with your sites prefix added to the table. There's a way where you can share common tables over all the sites, but it makes things a bit more trickier. The procedures for this are documented elsewhere.

Hi. I tried following the step-by-step for XAMPP and encountered an unusual problem where my http://localhost would redirect to C:/xampp/htdocs/drupal instead of the C:/xampp/htdocs that its VirtualHost tag pointed to. This seemed bizarre to me, as I had followed the steps properly, and when I would erase the VirtualHost tags for my original drupal site and test site, the localhost would indeed direct to C:/xampp/htdocs as it was supposed to.

I was able to correct this behavior by uncommenting "##NameVirtualHost *:80" (located in httpd-vhosts.conf) and changing it to "NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80" and created my VirtualHost tags as follows

I hope this is helpful for anyone trying to set up a Windows XP test server using XAMPP.

As far as I can tell Drupal defaults to whatever the name of the sites folder is for the domain.

So, on localhost you would have "http://sitename/" and get the site located in "c:/wamp/www/drupal/sites/sitename".

However, in a production environment am I incorrect in assuming that if you have "http://sitename.com/" then you get the site located in "/home/username/drupal/sites/sitename.com", but would not get correct results if the folder was named as follows: "/home/username/drupal/sites/sitename"

The question is, in my localhost environment, is there a way to override this so that my folders match with production?

So, what I want to happen is, on localhost when I point to "http://sitename/" I get the contents of "c:/wamp/www/drupal/sites/sitename.com"

//BEGIN EDIT

I found an extremely dirty fix for this. Edit the bootstrap.inc file. Located in "drupalroot/includes/" is the file bootstrap.inc. On line 202 or so should be a function (conf_path) which handles locating the settings file for multisite installs.

I simply added the following lines of code after line 262 (after the for loop and $conf = "$confdir/default"; but before the line return $conf;):

if ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == 'sitename1') {
$conf = "$confdir/sitename1.com";
}
elseif ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == 'sitename2') {
$conf = "$confdir/sitename2.com";
}

I would strongly recommend against anyone uploading this modified bootstrap.inc to production, I have no idea what kind of damage it could cause. Basically this allows my directory structure to be as close to a 1:1 match as possible between production and staging. If someone has a less dangerous and dirty solution please offer, I would love to have it. Would even be nice to know if there is a way to put this into a module, so these things could be configured and added within Drupal. Could you extend that function to include the code somehow? A little over my head, but if it can be done, I would give it a wack.

//END EDIT

Thanks,
-junc

Hello, a nice tutorial but I needed to learn a few things by myself. Here they are:

1) In Windows XP, the hosts file is "lmhosts". By default, there exists a lmhosts.sam(sample) file. You need to just create a new lmhosts file, but without any extension and inside it add the domain name mapping lines mentioned in Step 3

2) When using XAMPP, you also need to uncomment this line in the httpd-vhosts.conf file, found in xamppdirectory\apache\conf\extra
NameVirtualHost *:80

Then you are of to multisite installation. Bingo..!!!

Sorry i was excited....let me tell you one thing that when you make a copy of default.setting.php in site1 folder, dont make any change in db_url line.

I've setup the first site as described and thought everything was working fine. When attempting to install the second site, it only resolved to the first site already installed because the install wrote all the settings to the default settings.

I copied the newly created default settings into the firstdomain.org folder and reset the original default settings, but now, I simply get prompted for installing a choice of 3 domains, default, domain1 and domain2 no matter what I type into the URL.

What is wrong? This test is on a local XAMPP windows setup, and quite frankly not much different with MAMPP on the Mac.

Tried lots of variations on the settings, deleting, including, not sure where to go now.

Version 6 Drupal

I've been searching for the right method to make it work on Windows.
For some reason , Junctions and symlinks did not work for me, but your explanation, did it!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!

very helpful tutorial

Your tutorial helped a lot!