Lessons learnt from an installation

Posted by Victoire on Jan 30, 2007 in Applications, Infrastructure, Tools, Tutorials

I have just completed a manual installation of drupal 5 on my personal server. I decided to blog about it as I went through the process - as my own personal mission - with the aim of providing some guidelines to anyone else wanting to manually install drupal themselves.

i am a geek on a mission[1]. mission drupal 5 to be exact.

the tactic:

read INSTALL.txt word for word.

try to understand it.

you will do well young one.

the frontline operation:

download, extract, and copy the resultant drupal 5 folder into a directory within your root directory. check - using ftp program.

create the drupal database. umm. where? how? oh… i finally found it on cpanel’s MySQL account maintenance, no need to delve into phpMyAdmin.

create the drupal user. check - easy once you know where to look, similar to creating the db.

link the user to the db. check! now the db configuration looks like the configurations for the other db’s i already have installed.

run the install script. install script? i must run it? but when i point to the folder it doesn’t do anything. it gives me an access denied. *help* go back to the beginning…

“move the contents of the directory”. hmm. maybe i shouldn’t have moved the whole directory, but only it’s contents.

ha! it works! but now to give access to the settings.php file. also helps if you take note of the location of the settings file

voila! see how it runs!

remember to restore the access permissions on the settings.php file

configure drupal. *tears fill my eyes*… it worked! i can see the config screen.

the outcome:

i win!

drupal 5’s so pretty!

[1]actually, the use of the word geek when referring to me is very liberal. considering i haven’t done much *real* programming in yonks… i am an enthusiast…