By Steady on

After using drupal for a few months I have settled on approximately 30 additional modules which are common to all of my installs.

Is there a quicker way to install all of these modules for each site I build?

I have currently unpacked all of these modules onto my local machine and then ftp them into the sites/all/modules directory.

This can sometimes take ages to upload all of the files.

I use hostgator for hosting my sites and there, I can extract .tar.gz files using c-panel. This usually takes just a few seconds.

I want to know if there is a way to create one big .tar.gz file and then just upload this one file and then extract it on the server?

I have tried to understand installation profiles for a number of hours now over the last few weeks and I REALLY don't get that at all. Way too complicated for me.

I am clutching at straws and beginning to get VERY frustrated with how much time it takes to install drupal with all of the additional modules and tweaking. So if I can at least not have to wait ages when ftp-ing, that will be some help. I have dozens of sites to create.

I notice acquia drupal has an install .tar.gz file that has extra modules in addition to core, but I have other modules that I use. So it must be possible to create one big tarball somehow.

I have spent hours looking on drupal and google to try and find some information and I now have very little hair left :-)

So please, can any experts shed some light on how I can do this and speed up the install process.

(I don't know if one big .tar.gz is the answer. It just seemed logical to me).

By the way, I use shared hosting and don't know linux, or SSH at all, just windows XP Pro on my local PC machine.

Thanks,

Sam

Comments

dnewkerk’s picture

dnewkerk commented

Sure you can use a program like 7zip to make tar.gz files in Windows. For those using Macs, it's possible to make them via tar -czvf file.tar.gz your_data in Terminal. Many linux/unix servers can also unzip regular .zip files as well.

If you know how to use your SSH command line a bit on your host, you could also use Drush. Once set up, you could grab and automatically extract all of your desired modules by pasting in a single command, like this: drush dl views cck imagefield imageapi ... (etc)

For setting up common settings for module and site configuration, you should look into Features module or Patterns module.

espirates’s picture

espirates commented

Cpanel has a file manager, takes only a few seconds to upload