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2006, December 8 - 5:09pm — Dave Allen Barker Jr

Background

On 2006-12, I (Dave Allen Barker Jr) installed Drupal for my first time. This was my experience.

This information does not provide installation instruction on its own—it is meant as a companion to the installation information provided by Drupal and its dependencies.

Versions

This is not an endorsement of these versions, just what I happened to use during this particular installation.

Drupal
5.0 beta 2
Web Server
Apache 2.2.3
PHP
5.2.0
Database
MySQL Community Server 5.0.27
Host
Debian testing 2006-12 (almost etch)

Procedure

Filesystem

It is important that we do not grant any more permissions to files and directories than necessary. Because we're working in our user (home) directory, anything we add will have our default user permissions. This may not be enough, but we will grant more as needed.

I made a directory named 620 for any files (not just Drupal's) this project may need.

Drupal, Get It

Unfortunately, Drupal was not packaged for Debian a the time, so I:

  1. Made a directory named drupal in the 620 directory and change to it
  2. Downloaded Drupal there
  3. Unpacked the tarball
  4. Made a symlink (ln -s) named live to the unpacked drupal directory (drupal-5.0-beta2)

This last step I did in anticipation of future Drupal upgrades. My thought is that simply changing the live simlink will allow "pivoting" into a new Drupal version without the need to change any settings that might depend on its location.

Requirements Installation

Drupal's INSTALL.txt file specifies its requirements, of which all were available as Debian packages. This made installation as easy as:

  1. aptitude install apache2 php5 php5-mysql mysql-server

Web Server Configuration

Database Creation

Instructions specific to created Drupal's database in MySQL are provided in Drupal's INSTALL.mysql.txt file. I chose the following names:

databasename
620drupal
username
620

Note: I began with a database name of 620-drupal but later learned its dash (-) was the reason why the command to set the access database rights was failing me. I also learned that one way to fix the command in MySQL was to escape the database name with backticks (`620-drupal`). This made me nervous, and not wanting to trust that all other programs accessing the database would properly escape my dash laden database name, I removed the dash.