By bwv on

Motivated by this post, I offer the following for creating, in under 10 minutes, a multisite installation via Plesk 8.6, on a 1and1 VPS.

1. Set up a domain so that you have a functioning web site on your VPS. For the purposes of this writeup, I will refer to this site as mydomain1.com.

2. Go to the mydomain1.com control panel, and add a domain alias. You should, of course, not only own the domain name you are aliasing, but should already have pointed it to your VPS. I merely added this second domain name to my VPS package. For the purposes of this example, this second domain is called mydomain2.com.

3. Go into mydomain1.com/sites, and create a folder called mydomain2.com. Find a fresh copy of settings.php and copy and paste it into that folder. Make sure the settings.php file is writeable.

4. In your web browser, type mydomain2.com/install.php, and fill out the required fields. Important: If you intend to put the multisite setup on a single database, please make sure you use a discrete db table prefix for each multisite domain you create.

5. If all goes as it should, you will soon have set up a second, completely discrete website that is powered by the scripts in the main drupal installation (i.e., in this case, the scripts that power mydomain1.com).

6. This process can be repeated ad infinitum, or until you use up your VPS disk allocation, whichever comes first. You can do everything related to the multisite setup -- creating the folder, creating settings.php, setting file permissions -- from within the Plesk file manager control panel; neither symlinks nor access to SSH is required.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

beckyjohnson’s picture

beckyjohnson commented

In regards to this:
"Important: If you intend to put the multisite setup on a single database, please make sure you use a discrete db table prefix for each multisite domain you create."

How do you do this? I can't really find an explanation that makes sense.

Becky

bwv’s picture

bwv commented

This is done in your settings.php file. Look for the following section:

$db_url = 'mysql://username:password@localhost/databasename';
$db_prefix = '';

If your settings.php file is in a folder called domain2.net, and you intend to create the database tables for domain2.net on the same database as some other sites you have created, you can distinguish domain2.net's tables in the $db_prefix line, by including something like this:

$db_prefix = 'domain2net_';

Hope that helps.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

http://classicvinyl.biz
http://music.bwv810.com
http://association.drupal.org/user/1207

beckyjohnson’s picture

beckyjohnson commented

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. I have one more question, since I'm new to this multi site set up, is this set up for multi sites sharing core files but having different databases or are all multi sites set up this way sharing the same database. I've been doing a lot of research into this but I'm still unsure as to which set up is best.

Thanks
Becky

bwv’s picture

bwv commented

Yes, this set up (described in the initial post) is one set of core files (one codebase) and multiple sites running off of their own database tables. Each set of tables uses a prefix so that drupal can distinguish one set of tables from another. This is critical because all the tables reside on the same database. (The database is, for lack of a better description, the virtual disc that holds all the tables that serve one site.)

You can have ten drupal sites (one mother site and nine running off that codebase) and each of the ten can have its own discrete database. In that case, you would not need a prefix for each set of tables. Site 1 (40 tables or thereabouts) would run off DB 1, site 2, DB 2, etc. Each DB has a username, password, server, and DB name (as in the code from the settings.php above).

If your host limits the number of databases you are allowed to have, then you may need to have the 10 sites share a single database. Since each site starts with the same number of tables (40 or so) you would in that case need prefixes.

I have a discrete database for one site that gets a lot of traffic, but then I have ten or more sites (not much traffic at all) that share another database. This is one way of going about it. I am not sure what the best practice approach is, but the nice thing about prefixes is that they allow you to have a multisite setup on a single database in the event your resources, or those of your webhost, are limited.

Hope that makes sense. regards
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http://classicvinyl.biz
http://music.bwv810.com
http://association.drupal.org/user/1207

awdlewis’s picture

awdlewis commented

Adding the Aliases is without doubt the most straight forward way of doing this however how do you then add mail accounts for a particular domain when essentially the Aliased domain isnt a real account within Plesk?

Docc’s picture

Docc commented

Exactly, because its under 1 account you will miss out on particular functionality. For example mail accounts. Wich basicly is the whole point of Plesk. To have a control panel/functions for each domain.

Keeping each site under its own account and just symlinking is a little bit more work but the pro is you will have a different plesk account for each domain.

summit’s picture

summit commented

Subscribing,
For multisite setup Drupal 7, domain module and vps at Strato.
What is the best approach? Symlinking or Domain Alias?
Greetings, Martijn

krazykellie’s picture

krazykellie commented

I've followed these steps but I'm not sure what's wrong with my install. I can't get the install.php to show up to finish the process.

Any ideas?