Installing Drupal on Fedora Core

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Installing Drupal on Fedora Core [under construction!]

This will install the Content Management System (CMS) named Drupal. We assume you already have a working Apache and PHP configuration (see our Installing Apache document for help).

For more information about Drupal, visit http://www.drupal.org.

1. Drupal is not included in the Fedora default repository or extras so we have to download and install it. It is actually a very easy install, concisting only of a group of PHP scripts. We choose to put Drupal in its own subdirectory, not at the document root.

At the time of this writing, the current version of Drupal is 4.6.2. Modify the commands as appropriate to work with the latest version.

 cd /var/www/html                                             
 wget http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.6.2.tar.gz
 tar -xvzf drupal-4.6.2.tar.gz
 mv drupal-4.6.2 drupal

Correct the filesystem permissions on the drupal folder. By default, they are owned by user and group number 302. Change them to what makes sense for your organization.


 chown -R root drupal
 chgrp -R root drupal

2. Set up the MySQL database and database user that will hold the Drupal content. You will need this mysql username and password in the next step.

 mysql -u root -p            

  mysql> CREATE DATABASE drupal;
  mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON drupal.* TO 'drupal_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'thepassword'; 
  mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Load the required drupal information from the provided sql file:


 mysql -u drupal_user -p drupal < drupal/database/database.mysql

3. Modify the settings for your Drupal site. They are contained in drupal/sites/default/settings.php. To get started, you most likely only need to modify two lines:

 $db_url = 'mysql://drupal_user:thepassword@localhost/drupal';
 $base_url = 'http://mywebserver.flmnh.ufl.edu/drupal';   
  [Remember, we put drupal in a subdirectory.]

4. Install the PHP image functions (required for only some image-related drupal functions).

 yum -y install php-gd

5. Access the drupal site and create the first user (click the link in the center blob of text on your new drupal site). The first account is automatically the site administrator, so choose your account carefully. To add additional site administrators, you will need to create a new role that has the administrative privileges you want (essentially, all of the checkboxes) and assign it to an individual account.

Last Update 7/1/2005 by Dan Stoner

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