Drupal Multisite Installation on Ubuntu 10

Last updated August 5, 2011. Created by danielhonrade on May 29, 2010.
Edited by enpjp, eli-f. Log in to edit this page.

Preliminaries

This tutorial assumes that you have already installed Ubuntu 10 or 11 and LAMP on a server or desktop

Install the LAMP packages by typing the following command in a terminal window:

sudo tasksel

A dialog window will open. Select the LAMP option by scrolling with the up/down arrow keys and click spacebar. If the result is a "command not found" then tasksel is not yet installed. Install it by typing:

sudo apt-get install tasksel

You should now be able to install the LAMP packages

Be aware of reported problems when using tasksel to install a LAMP stack in the Ubuntu desktop environment. Note: An easy option is to install Drupal6 from the Ubuntu software repository using:

sudo apt-get install drupal6

However, the software repositories are not necessarily up to date, so you should not use this method if you intend on migrating to a live installation

Install PHPMyAdmin for wysiwyg management of the mySQL database using:

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin.

Check your installation by pointing your browser to:
localhost

you should see the default Apache web server page:

It works!

Now point your browser to:

localhost/phpmyadmin

You should see the login page of phpmyadmin. Using root password, which was set during installation, you can create and modify users and databases to work with your Drupal installation.

Step 1

• Create a folder called 'drupal' -> /home/<your ubuntu login name>/, you can navigate to your home folder and create this folder
• the result should be -> /home/daniel/drupal/ , I am using 'daniel' as my ubuntu login name

Step 2

• You can now happily extract your drupal 6 to /home/daniel/drupal/ , by having this folder you can also add your 'drupal7' for drupal 7 version
• the result should be -> /home/daniel/drupal/drupal6/, /home/daniel/drupal/drupal6/sites/ , note: usually, you get a folder like 'drupal-6.16' after extraction, but I just made 'drupal6'

Step 3

• Edit 'host' by bringing on the terminal window, use this command 'sudo gedit /etc/hosts'
• You can add any site name, ex. 127.0.0.1 mysite.com, then save

Step 4

• Go to this sites-available folder, use this command 'cd /etc/apache2/sites-available'
• Create a file called 'mysite.com', use this command 'sudo gedit mysite.com'
• Write the following:
  
  <VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
  ServerName mysite.com

  DocumentRoot /home/daniel/drupal/drupal6

  <Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
• Save it, then enable it, use this command sudo a2ensite mysite.com
• Reload apache, use this command sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Step 5

• Create your site in sites folder, /home/daniel/drupal/drupal6/sites/mysite.com
• Add settings.php to this folder, /home/daniel/drupal/drupal6/sites/mysite.com/settings.php
• Make sure that settings.php is writeable by others.

Step 6

• Open your browser, then type 'http://mysite.com'
• You should see the installation setup of Drupal 6

Step 7

• Make your settings.php read only again to avoid security messages.

Repeat Steps 3-7 to add another site, ex. mysite2.com

Note: I might have missed something, please put your comments, thanks