Installation Guide

Last updated October 3, 2012. Created by LeeHunter on April 25, 2008.
Edited by tvn, silverwing, Heine, nevets. Log in to edit this page.

Hosting note

To install and run Drupal your web host must meet certain minimum requirements. Most web hosts meet these requirements. However, a few stand out by also supporting the Drupal community. If you need a host, consider selecting one of our reviewed web hosts.

Introduction to installation

Drupal provides an installation script that automatically populates database tables and configures the correct settings in the settings.php file. This section covers preparing for installation, running the installation script itself, and the steps that should be done after running the installation script has completed. It also explains how to do a "multi site" installation, where a number of different Drupal sites run off the same code base.

Before proceeding with your first Drupal installation, you should also review the best practices section. For help with Drupal terms, see the glossary page.

Other tools

Some of the steps in the installation process can be performed with tools such as graphical applications for moving files and managing databases or tools that are provided by your hosting service. This documentation focuses on performing tasks at the command line. For information on using other tools, see the documentation that accompanies the application or is provided by your hosting service.

Creating a test site on a local computer

It is considered a good practice to do all development work on a separate test site before making changes to a production site. A test site allows you to evaluate the impact of upgrades, new modules, modifications to themes etc. without causing disruption to your live site. For information about setting up a web server on a local computer, see the Local Server Setup section of the Developing for Drupal guide.

Alternative methods for installation

Some web hosting companies offer "one-click" installations of Drupal, or specific Drupal support. You may be able to locate one on the Drupal hosting page (these hosting companies also support the Drupal project).

There is also information about Drupal distributions, which include installation profiles and pre-packaged distributions of Drupal and modules. These may be of help as well.

Comments

Need page to profile differences between releases

Posted by Starbuck on March 26, 2011 at 1:55am

For someone familiar with D6, for example, it would help to have a page that just profiled differences in installation between that release and D7. Otherwise someone needs to go through every page to see if 1) there may not be any differences, or 2) there might be differences that for some reason no one posted into the general purpose install guide.

Or perhaps a simple comment could be placed at the top:
"If you are already familiar with installing D6 then nothing significant in D7 has changed and you shouldn't need to re-read this guide."
or
"If you are already familiar with installing D6, D7 has some differences which may be significant. Look for the '*' next to instructions that are fundamentally different between D7 and prior releases."

I understand that version information was removed from this guide, and for good reason. Now we could use some judicious re-insertion where version differences are actually important.

I'd write the material myself but I simply don't know yet. I'm looking to install D7 for the first time today (having installed D6 many times) and without reading everything here I can't tell yet if I need to learn everything from scratch or (more likely) if there's nothing new to learn and I can install in a few minutes just like D6.

Thanks!

Installation Process and Requirements

Posted by shamio on March 10, 2012 at 11:06am

@Starbuck
The installation steps didn't change a lot. The installation process is simple and similar to other versions and i think its the reason that version number has been removed from this documentation.

@jhomme
The requirements of Drupal for version 5, 6 and 7 didn't change a lot. The main difference is required PHP and MySQL versions. When core files are improving, its clear that they need newer version of PHP and MYSQL to run with the best performance and abilities.
For example the minimum required PHP and MYSQL versions for different versions of Drupal are:
Drupal 5: MySQL 3.23.17 and PHP 4.4.0 or higher
Drupal 6: MySQL 4.1 and PHP 4.4.0 or higher
Drupal 7: MySQL 5.0.15 and PHP 5.2.5 or higher
So the detailed requirements are not entered in installation Guide page and they are accessible in System requirements page which is linked from this page too.

Shamio

Hello, can you recommend

Posted by Prague man on August 6, 2012 at 9:21pm

Hello, can you recommend currently the best book on Drupal 7 please, which I got in Prague? Thank you.

My projects running on Drupal:
Prague tourist information | Prague airport transfers

Thanks a lot for the useful

Posted by hbgdmws on November 6, 2012 at 11:01am

Thanks a lot for the useful information

Drupal 7 for Mac OS Snow Leopard

Posted by druclamee on July 22, 2012 at 8:29am

Hi there.
I joined yesterday and got all excited about Drupal but the reality hit me hard...With no knowledge in programming and being a complete idiot about PHP, etc. I feel hopeless.
Nothing is working and it looks like I won't be able to use Drupal 7 (or any other version for that matter) without going through something like this:
...configuring Apache, MySQL & PHP on OS X Lion 10.7 and 10.6
http://www.coolestguyplanettech.com/how-to-install-php-mysql-apache-on-o...

Can someone explain it to me, in a layman's terms, how to use Drupal 7 when there's no previous experience in programming and nothing installed on a MAC computer? I mean, I don't even have a disk for my MAC OS because it was installed by the genius bar techs at an Apple store.
What are the steps?
If the steps are exactly what the mentioned link says...I don't think Drupal is as easy as it's been presented.

Can anyone help me?
Thank you.

Clam

Long Instruction Manual

Posted by PalaDolphin on July 22, 2012 at 5:11pm

I've never seen a longer instruction manual.

Is there a manual?

Posted by druclamee on July 24, 2012 at 12:31am

What would be the right thing to do if there's no experience in programming and the fact that we'll be using MAC computers? To give up drupal?
Everybody seem to like Drupal but we haven't been able to figure out how to use it and how to find info on this site to answer our questions. Any suggestions, anyone? Thanks!

Clam

Drupal Install On Mac OSX

Posted by neilgee on July 26, 2012 at 12:51am

That guide mentioned above was for people that know a bit more about what is required for web development - for a newbie coming in to learn I would suggest Drupal Gardens - http://www.drupalgardens.com/ or if you want to install it on your machine there is a simpler OSX guide here at the Coolest Guy Planet Tech site

Do both!

Posted by PalaDolphin on July 30, 2012 at 3:40pm

neilgee has a good suggestion. I recommend doing both; that is install it as a development platform on your own machine AND sign up for Drupal Gardens.

I do have a few things to share about my experience with Drupal Gardens. You can start as a free site with limited resources (5 registered users) and upgarde later. As a free site, it is a sub-domain. For example, my URL is http://paladolphin.drupalgardens.com. Once you upgrade to a paid site, you can register a full domain name for free.

However, you cannot install contributed modules with Drupal Gardens; which IMHO takes away the entire power of Drupal. So, when it comes time to upgrade to a full domain name, I am going to go with another Drupal recommended host, Arvixe.com. They have 1 month, 6 month, 1, 2, & 3 year terms (longer terms have lower monthly costs). I can start a Drupal Web site w/free domain registration for only $7 (1 month)!

Happy Web development!

-=- PalaDolphin

Thanks for sending us newbies

Posted by jasondaniels455 on October 3, 2012 at 9:04pm

Thanks for sending us newbies to a guide that doesn't scramble our brains at first look. :)

Getting rid fo the text box artifact

Posted by ncarty97 on August 10, 2012 at 2:32pm

After doing the update to the most recent version, it added that text box just below the stars. If you change the Text to display under the stars to 'No Text', you still end up with a small, though empty, text box. There does not appear to be a way to disable this via settings. I was able to get rid of it using CSS Injector by adding div.description { display: none; }, but that seems like a bad long term solution.

Any ideas or plans to change this behavior?

drupal installation

Posted by koushal on September 15, 2012 at 5:25pm

One of the good instruction given here http://ow.ly/dJOZ7

caricamento

Posted by antonvenrta on November 7, 2012 at 3:38pm

accredito a card euri.3000€

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