drupal notes

Drupal

Installing Drupal

A great user contributed guide to installing Drupal on a Rimuhosting VPS can be found here:

http://quadruple.ca/installing-drupal-rimuhosting-com

Nice shiny clean urls

I've fielded the question a few times lately about how to enable mod_rewrite so that clean urls will work. With Centos5 which is our current recommend distribution, this is easy to do. Assuming that you have unpacked drupal into /var/www/html/, you need to go to /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and look for this:

<Directory "/var/www/html">

In this container you need to edit:

AllowOverride None

to

AllowOverride All

This will enable the .htaccess file that ships with drupal, which contains the rewrite rules. If you not seeing this file in remember to use a command like:

/var/www/html/# ls -la | grep htaccess
-rw-r--r--  1 apache apache  3694 May 21 13:34 .htaccess

Alternatively, since you do have root access, you do not have to use a .htaccess file, and can copy this file directly into your /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, or into a file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ which is included into the configuration. The apache documentation recommends this for optimal performance. Although for simplicity, and ease of upgrading drupal, you may just want to leave it as is.