By cbdebris on

I have everything in place except what I do in htaccess. In fact, I can see the "index of /" page of the other domain.

I have read the "multisite how-to" (not complete enough and too many assumptions about skill level). I have been reading those pages for more than a week. I have read everything in the forums and elsewhere at least twice. I have looked at many people's pages as well.

For about an hour I had it working, but it went away and now I'm back to "index of /". Another mystery. I don't know what I did to get it working, and I don't know what I did to make it go away.

What do I put in htaccess in the public_html folder so that when a request for the second URL comes in, it goes to the correct sites/settings.php? I'm on Site5 if that is any help.

Please, I am not a developer and need clear, complete instructions.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

styro’s picture

styro commented

What directory contents are showing in you 'index of' page?

You should be configuring your webhosting so that all requests for the other URLs go to your main Drupal directory - not the subdirectories under 'sites'.

There is nothing in 'sites' to run Drupal. You need to run Drupal first (by sending the request through Drupals index.php), then Drupal itself works out which set of site settings to use based on the content of the request.

The two stages are:

1) configure your DNS/webserver etc so that all the extra site URLs you want end up being served by your main Drupal site. This step is highly dependent on how your server or hosting provider is set up. This is why there is no one size fits all step by step set of instructions. You need to know the desired end result then figure out how to make your environment suit that.

Then once all the URLs work properly for your main Drupal site...

2) set up extra directories under 'sites' where you can start giving each site its own settings etc. The multisite stuff under sites will have no effect unless Drupal is actually responding to the URL for each multisite. Futzing about with the sites directory before confirming step 1 is working will only add confusion.

--
Anton
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cbdebris’s picture

cbdebris commented

Thank you for clarifying and helping me to discard several conflicting pieces of advice that were provided in other forum posts.

The one that confused me most was the need to use Apache, htaccess, or Apache+htaccess, or some other arcane wizardry so these new sites point to the Drupal installation (and the index.php).

The "Index of" page seemed to show some contents of my public_html folder (a cgi_bin folder, for example). It looked like the domain pointed to the right place IOW.

Please indulge my ignorance, as I try to get this straight in my mind.

Here are what I now perceive to be the steps to attain this goal:

  1. Install Drupal and modules, themes, etc to be shared with all sites. (This step is complete.).
  2. Create the database for the other domains/
  3. Create domain pointers or parked domains that point at the Drupal installation. (Or point the DNS for a domain to the nameserver the primary site uses?)
  4. Create subfolders in the Sites folder for each domain; leave the Default folder to manage the primary site.
    (It is still not clear to me whether the new foldes should be named something like thisdomain or thisdomain.com).

    The folder contains at minimum a settings.php, with information on the domain's base_url and database -- or does the base_url point at the Drupal installation too?
  5. Add folders for themes and modules to any site folders where you want anything that differs from the themes, modules, etc., provided in the Drupal installation.

    6. Please, am I missing anything in the process, or still confused? I appreciate your help so much.