Introduction

On this page I will explain some preparations of the environment like creating the drupal group, a tempory files location, application reference location, etc.

Please read previous pages:

The drupal group

As we will enable the safe mode in group mode, we are in need of a system group.
SSH into the server as SU (super user or root)

add the group

$ groupadd drupal

add the apache, psaftp and psaadm users to the group
the group id (10002) could be different

$ vi /etc/group 
drupal:x:10002:apache,psaftp,psaadm

The temp directory

Also within the temp directory we need a matching group because uploaded files are temporarly saved there and then copied to the final destination.
Therefore we will create a seperate directory and chmod it so that each file created their automatically receives the drupal group. The latter is achieved by addin 2000 to the chmod command. 

$ mkdir /tmp/drupal
$ chmod 2775 /tmp/drupal
$ chgrp drupal /tmp/drupal

You will see an s appear instead of the x at the group part:

drwxrwsr-x   2 root   drupal    4096 Oct 16 15:09 drupal

The reference location

This is a directory where all symlinks are placed that point to the current version of an application. It is this location that all vhosts will reference so that they don't depend on the current version.
When switching versions, we only need to alter the symlinks at this location and all vhosts will be updated automatically. See further pages for more info.
SSH into the server as SU (super user or root)

$ mkdir /var/www/apps

Navigation

As the book seems to order the sub pages by date, I list here the order of further reading: