Installing Drupal

“RTFM!”, they scream. For most people this is the last resort. Therefore, it is almost expected nowadays that a web application will install with as little hassle as possible. If you’re capable, I suggest beefing up the fresh install process for your favourite open source web application and feeding it back to the project. It will result in more uptake from your project, as the barrier to entry is lower, or best case, removed.

Anyway, I put my head down and ran forth to install Drupal. Here’s what I found:

1. There was an instantly visible Download link on the Drupal website. Wanting to avoid potential problems I steered clear of the 6.0RC2 release (even though it’s likely to be pretty solid) and went for the 5.6 release.

2. I extracted it into my /var/www directory and pointed my browser at http://localhost/drupal-5.6/

3. Hooray, no error page and what looked like the first step of an installation wizard. I was informed that /var/www/drupal-5.6/sites/default/settings.php had to be writable. Clickety click, sorted.

4. Refreshed the page and was asked for database credentials. Even though it said the database had to exist, I tried without creating it anyway. I got the perfect error message telling me that the login to the database was successful, but the database didn’t exist. Ever curious I tried again with the wrong username and password and the error changed appropriately.

5. Created the database on the server and tried again. Turns out the user I created some time ago had no administrative access over the tables (no LOCK TABLE access). Clickety click, sorted. I then tried one last time and all the tables were created and I was told to remove write permission to the settings.php file. I’ll leave it read/write for now to see what happens.

6. Welcome To Your New Drupal Website.

7. Unable to stop myself, I follow the link and create myself an admin account, then log in with it.

I now get slightly less than a billion customisation options which scares me off for a bit. I was going to take a backup of the database but considering the amount of effort to get to this point I’ll just start from scratch if I need to. Interestingly the status report (shows up when you click Administer) told me about the writable settings.php file and some other things that I’ll have to look into (file system can’t be written to, no cron). They don’t sound big.

Tune in next time when Bob maybe knows something useful about Drupal.