Note

ApacheTriad is no longer supported.

One of the most useful and productive techniques for working with Drupal is to install it on your own computer. Having Drupal installed on your local computer allows you to rapidly prototype Drupal sites using any combination of contributed modules and themes, dry-run upgrade installations of Drupal without interrupting production sites, and perform any other Drupal task much more quickly by allowing you to work locally instead of remotely. This tutorial addresses a simple method of setting up a web server on your own computer that functions identically to many commercial web hosting services, however it is not intended as a tutorial for turning your computer into a web server or using it to host a site. This tutorial focuses on installing the web server software as a means of working on a copy or prototype Drupal site, i.e. the result is not part of the internet, and can't be accessed from the internet. The advantage is that the software runs much faster on your own computer.

While Drupal will work with Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS), this tutorial will focus on a specific package, apache2triad, available for download from sourceforge.net. Though all that is needed to run Drupal is a web browser, apache, PHP4 (4.3.3) or higher and mySQL, apache2triad comes with a variety of other features that will not be covered in this tutorial.

Best of all, however, apache2triad requires no additional configuration in order to set up and install Drupal, making it an ideal choice for novice web site creators wishing to learn to set up and use a Drupal site with only very modest skills and almost no previous experience.

Tools needed to complete this tutorial:
A web browser.
An archive program capable of extracting .tar and .gz files, such as 7-Zip.
An FTP client like coreFTP (optional).