By aprice42 on

Hi,

I am new to drupal... I am working on a mac osx 10.5....

I have a working copy of Drupal 6.x installed using MAMP locally on my mac. I have my site living in /Users/myusername/Sites/drupal

I have read through a number of posts on setting up multisites. All of them seem to be written for either users in a windows environment, or in a web server environment, and I cannot get the solutions to work for me.

Is there anyone out there that can offer advice for mac users and multisites?

Thanks,
Andy

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

mistresskim’s picture

mistresskim commented

I have two Drupal installations running on a mac with MAMP. Each one is under the directory Applications/MAMP/htdocs. So I have...

Applications/MAMP/htdocs/drupal5
Applications/MAMP/htdocs/drupal6

I set up each one in the same way as if I was just setting up one installation. I created a database called drupal5 for the drupal5 site, another database called drupal6 for the drupal6 site from the phpMyAdmin page linking off http://localhost:8888/MAMP/. I also set up a user called admin who has privileges to both databases. After that I just went to /install.php for both sites and did the Drupal install, made the settings.php file, sites/default/files folder and what not.

On occasions, I've got stuck in an install loop where Drupal won't accept the the database and password details, but there's a way to get around that. What kind of problems are you having?

aprice42’s picture

aprice42 commented

Thanks for the quick response...

Of course, that works great, however...

I was actually hoping to set this up a bit more cleanly as directed in the multisite installation instructions on drupal.org, setting up each site within drupal/sites/ directory

the directions I have found direct me to create directories for each site (ie. site1.com, site2.com) and then modify the settings.php file to point to the appropriate database. This makes sense on a webserver, however, I am working locally not with domains, so that will not work for me...

my site currently lives at http://localhost, so my thought was that I could set it up to have dev sites at
http://localhost/dev1
http://localhost/dev2
http://localhost/dev3

however, trying to set it up this way didn't seem to work, as I kept getting 404 errors when navigating to those urls...

Your solution will definitely work for me if I can't get the multisite install figured out, but I would love to figure out the multisite thing :-)

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

To make this work, you need to do two things:

Step 1. Make the URL http://localhost/dev1 go to the same directory as the URL http://localhost, that is, to the directory where Drupal is installed. This is necessary because Drupal's index.php file *must* be accessed. (More about how to do this, later)

Step 2. When Drupal's index.php runs, it well check the requested URL, will compare that with the names of the directories under drupal/sites, and will bring up the right site. In your case, these directories must be named sites/localhost.dev1 and sites/localhost.dev2. This is explained in the INSTALL.txt file.

Back to Step 1: You have Drupl installed in /Users/myusername/Sites/drupal, right? You will need to create two symlinks under that directory, named dev1 and dev2:

ln -s /Users/myusername/Sites/drupal /Users/myusername/Sites/drupal/dev1
ln -s /Users/myusername/Sites/drupal /Users/myusername/Sites/drupal/dev2

So, whenever a browser goes to dev1 or dev2 it will always end up in drupal, while the requested URL will be retained. That is all. Browse to the new sites and they will be installed.

aprice42’s picture

aprice42 commented

it all seems to be working :-)

Thank You!

aprice42’s picture

aprice42 commented

all seems to be working well, except for the clean urls...

I enabled those by adding the following to my httpd.conf file

<Directory /Users/andy/Sites/drupal>
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
</Directory>

do I need to update that to somehow reflect the other sites added?

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

I am not sure. Can't clean URLs be enabled at all for the other sites? Or are they enabled but they give wrong menu links?

First, I would check if Options +FollowSymlinks is enabled.

Or, if that doesn't solve the problem, I would try removing the RewriteBase / line.

Or, if that doesn't work, and it breaks the first site too, keep the RewriteBase / line and try adding a couple of blocks for the subdirectories to override their inherited RewriteBase, such as:

<Directory /Users/andy/Sites/drupal/dev1>
   RewriteBase /dev1
</Directory>
<Directory /Users/andy/Sites/drupal/dev2>
   RewriteBase /dev2
</Directory>

Or, if its a matter of wrong menu links, then set the $base_url in each site's settings.php file. What needs to be done depends on whether PHP is installed as an apache module or as a cgi binary, among other things, but some smart trial-and-error usually solves the problem.

aprice42’s picture

aprice42 commented

Sorry, to go back a step... I was trying to setup another computer with dev3 site following the same directions but now when I navigate to http://localhost/nav3 all I get is a blank page...

I set up a symlink for the drupal directory called dev3 and placed it in the drupal directory
I created a directory in sites called localhost.dev3
I copied a fresh copy of settings.php into that directory

and upon navigating to the page http://localhost/dev3 i just a get a blank page...

any thoughts?

Thanks for your time and patience... Andy

darumaki’s picture

darumaki commented

You don't need to use symlink on mac when using mamp

here's one way to set it up

put drupal inside Users/yourname/Sites, you may have to change document root of you using the regular mamp

ie Sites/drupal

this directory is where you'll point each of your virtual host domains to

Then in drupal under drupal/sites/ you'll create your multi-sites

ie drupal/sites/default
drupall/sites/test.dev

I'm using Mamp Pro which takes care of all the virtual hosts and makes this easy via a user interface,

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

A blank screen may mean insufficient php memory (among other things - see http://drupal.org/node/158043). Also check you apache logs just in case there is some helpful error message there.

Or, you could try darumaki's suggestion to use subdomains instead of subdirectories in your URLs (such as http://localhost.dev1), and create additional virtual hosts for the other sites instead of symlinks. One benefit of that is that if you wanted to move your site to some host, internal paths for images etc would remain the same.

aprice42’s picture

aprice42 commented

I tried the sub domain route with MAMP pro and I am still getting the WPOD. I went through my memory config and that is more than plenty, and none of the other comments on the WPOD page seemed to apply, any other thoughts?

munroe_richard’s picture

munroe_richard commented

My configuration is that my drupal site is located in:

http://localhost/~myusername/ESPlannerWeb/

I've defined a new site:

sites/bu.esplanner.com

and put a link into my Sites directory as:

ln -s ~/Sites/ESPlannerWeb bu

I then put a copy of default.settings.php into sites/bu.esplanner.com

and a link:

ln -s ~/Sites/ESPlannerWeb/sites/bu.esplanner.com sites/localhost.bu

I then use my web browser to access:

http://localhost/~myusername/bu

and get the page that is served as if I had requested:

http://localhost/~myusername/ESPlannerWeb

As I understand it I should have seen the configuration process for bu.esplanner.com.

When I look in the access_log I see the request for ~/dickmunroe/bu but all the pages requests actually get directed through sites/all rather than through sites/localhost.bu

So, what am I doing wrong? This all looks right but it ain't working...

Best,

Dick Munroe

munroe_richard’s picture

munroe_richard commented

The directory in sites has to include the ~myusername, thus the link to the bu.esplanner.com directory must be:

ln -s ~/Sites/ESPlanner/sitest/bu.esplanner.com sites/localhost.~myusername.bu

and the configuration directory came up.

Best,

Dick Munroe

bassplaya’s picture

bassplaya commented

Same system, same things installed
I encountered a lot of difficulties with browsing from one site to the other.. it would always give problems so what I've done is:
1. each site has a user with dedicated privileges
2. if I want to switch to another site I'll go in the MAMP preferences and switch the Document root under the Apache tab.

for me this approach makes me happy though my MAMP is very slow, my online server is much faster, why is that? Should it be like that?

Authentically,
BassPlaya

darumaki’s picture

darumaki commented

One thing I should also note is for localhost setup I made sure to use base_url in the settings.php, I also removed the :8888 and can use regular testdomain.dev instead of .dev:8888

aterchin’s picture

aterchin commented

darumaki:
how you set it up with mamp pro? I'm using the trial version, but something's wrong with my setup. trying to get a dev.mysite going in the sites folder, and couldn't get this done with normal MAMP. Problem's with me, but i'm missing something essential.

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

Using virtual hosts? Have you set the DocumentRoot of all your sites to Drupal's main directory?

aterchin’s picture

aterchin commented

thanks, cog.

I was incorrectly setting the document root AND my new virtual host both to the main drupal directory, 'mysite', whereas virtual host should be 'dev.mysite.com'.
correct settings for anyone else with MAMP:

  1. Create folder 'dev.mysite.com' in 'sites' folder with 'settings.php' copied from 'default.settings.php' and renamed.
  2. Go to hidden hosts file on the mac (use BBEdit to see hidden files if necessary) in 'private/etc/hosts' and enter in
    127.0.0.1 dev.mysite.com
    after the last line. Close the file.
  3. Go to the MAMP apache config folder, open 'httpd.conf' and uncomment the
    # NameVirtualHost *
  4. Add the two entries below it. The first should be the same as yours if you haven't changed the default MAMP document root, and the second should look like this:
NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>
   DocumentRoot "/Applications/MAMP/htdocs"
   ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
DocumentRoot "/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/mysite"
ServerName dev.mysite.com
</VirtualHost>

*** dont put PHP tags there, i did it so the vhost tags would show up.

Restart your MAMP servers and voila, you'll get the new site install screen at http://dev.mysite.com:8888/install.php?profile=default

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

Instead or <?php ... ?> tags you can use <code> ... </code> tags to avoid displaying the tags themselves.

aterchin’s picture

aterchin commented

i know that. you're right. first time i previewed it i could swear the brackets around the <Virtualhost> tags disappeared. i think my eyes were playing tricks. up too long. thanx anyways for the original response.