os-specific

If you have clean Fedora (or RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux) you have SELinux enabled by default after clean installation. There are few more steps to be done to be able to finish Drupal installation on SELinux enabled site to gain more security by SELinux.

If you don't want to use SELinux you may simply disable it, but this is not recommended as SELinux is able to block some exploits. Also you may turn SELinux into permissive mode to go through creating the settings.php file (because even if you have set the permissions for writing to settings.php, the install script will think you don't because SELinux is active and is blocking writing to settings.php file).

On a Windows system using IIS:

1. Right-click on sites\default\settings.php and grant Write permissions to IUSR_MachineName (IIS6) or IUSR (IIS7).

Server 2008: You can also do this from the command line from within your sites\default directory:

icacls settings.php /grant IUSR:W

The installer will change the file back to Read Only after installation, but you should verify this after installation.

For more information about modifying Windows file permissions, see the Troubleshooting FAQ.

Note for SELinux users

To install on a Fedora-based distro (RHEL, CentOS, etc.) there are two main options:

• Install from the repository through a yum install drupal command.
• Install it yourself.

The installation instructions will vary a bit depending on your choice, as will the version you wind up with in some cases.

To be compliant with FHS guidelines on architecture independent system components (http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#THEUSRHIERARCHY) vs transient data placement (http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#THEVARHIERARCHY) and to enforce Fedora-ish system segregation Fedora and its derivatives place the code part of systems like Drupal and WikiMedia in /usr/share and the data elements (like files/ and images/) in /var/www. These parts are bound together through a series of symlinks, as the original development concept behind Drupal and other such systems did not take the FHS into account (there is a pretty big generation/culture gap between core Unix developers and web developers -- and embedding code to this extent inside of what used to be public data files (.html files becoming .php files and totally bypassing cgi-bin) was never thought of when the FHS was originally conceived). This can be confusing for newcomers.

Prerequisites

• Unzip program for processing .tar.gz files. .tar.gz is a format Windows doesn't understand by default. This tutorial assumes you've downloaded and installed the freely available utility 7-Zip to allow you to extract .tar.gz files. A number of other file compression utilities are also available.

Download Drupal

1. At the project download page, find the version you want to download. In this case, select the first Drupal 7 version under the section 'Official Releases.' Click on 'Download.' Save the file (don't open it with another program.)

2. Uncompress the file. Right-click on the .tar.gz file and select 7-Zip >> Extract here. Right-click on the .tar file and repeat. You will now see the final Drupal folder. Drag and drop the folder where you need it to be.

   Note: If you extract the files into a folder other than your web site's folder, copy the contents of the Drupal folder into the appropriate web folder, rather than cutting/pasting them. (This will ensure the files will inherit the appropriate permissions for the web server.)

   Note:If you are using Apache instead of IIS skip the next two steps.