How to Create a Multisite Drupal Installation
Uses for a multisite installation:
- Hosting two separate Drupal domains, such as: domain1.com and domain2.com.
- Hosting a Drupal sub-domain, such as: domain.com and blog.domain.com.
- Create a backup of your site using your Plesk Control Panel! This will allow you to easily revert should something go wrong, or you don't like the multisite setup.
- Connect to your site using FTP. If you are unfamiliar with using FTP, see: How to Use FTP
- In your FTP client, navigate to the /httpdocs/sites/ directory.
- In the /httpdocs/sites/ directory, create a folder that reflects the domain name of the site.
- Example: blog.domain.com or domain2.com
- IMPORTANT: Add the new site as a domain alias in your Plesk Control Panel. See: How to Create Domain Aliases in Plesk
- Navigate to the /httpdocs/sites/default/ directory.
- Download the default.settings.php file to your local machine and rename it to settings.php
- Upload settings.php to the new folder you created. Example: /httpdocs/sites/blog.domain.com/
- Navigate to /httpdocs/ and download the install.php file to your local machine.
- Navigate back to /httpdocs/sites/[SiteYouCreated] and upload the install.php file.
- Using your browser, browse to the new site you created and append /install.php to the end. Example: blog.domain.com/install.php
- This will bring you to the Drupal installation page. Proceed with the options of your choice.
- On the Set up database page, supply the database name, username, and password you wish to host the application on.
- It is recommended that you use a separate MySQL database, to reduce the stress on the application's database. You may purchase a second database through your control panel by going to Account > Buy Resources > Increase Maximum number of MySQL databases by 1. > Next > Confirm the order.
- You may also host the application in the existing Drupal database by supplying the current database credentials, and expanding Advanced Options and setting Table Prefix to something such as blog_
- This will prefix every database table with blog_, so the two instances can function side by side. This may impact the performance of your sites, as you are running two sites off of one database.
- Click Save and continue, this will create a second instance of Drupal, and will bring you to the Configure Site page.
- Fill out the site information as you see fit, and click Save and continue when finished.
- You have now created another instance of Drupal on your domain, and can build your second site to suit your needs.
Article ID: 1998, Created: May 14, 2014 at 7:12 AM, Modified: August 26, 2014 at 7:57 AM