Thinking outside the box!

Installing a multi-site system on Drupal in less than 10 minutes

Posted Mon, 07/24/2006 - 16:27 by Isaac

Someone had posted a comment on my Setting Up Drupal in 10 minutes. This is the response to that reader's questions. Hi Isaac, Great job with the install post! I can't wait for the Testing, Site Structure and Creating Content episodes. You had mentioned previously that you had setup two installs running a total of 10 sites. The multi-site funcionalty sounds amazing! Can you walk me through how you implemented those multi-func setups? Dear reader, I am glad to see that you liked the guide on installing Druapl and yes I really need to finish the rest of it soon.
Here is how I installed and continue to run multiple websites on the same code base of Drupal. This makes Drupal the King of CMS sites if you ask me, due to the easy maintenance of using the same code base. STEP ONE: Under my "Initial Setup" you will notice that the "default folder" in the 'sites' dir will be the default location for the settings.php of a single-site install (you can rename it as I had suggested) IF YOU WANT A MULTI-SITE... then simply create new directories in the /drupal/sites/xxxx. For example:

If you have three domains for 3 sites

Then the directories would look like this (with a unique settings.php in each folder):

    /drupal/sites/example-1.com /drupal/sites/example-2.com /drupal/sites/example-2.com/site3

STEP TWO: Of' course you will still need to point the DNS for each domain name to the ROOT DRUPAL folder and NOT /drupal/sites/xxxx - Drupal automatically directs the individual request to drupal/sites/example.com NEXT: The remaining steps are the same as a single install. Note that if you are limited on the number of DB then you can run multiple sites from just one DB. Simply load the new DB files with a n_ appended to each table (with "n" being the designation for your multi-site) and then use that n_ name for your settings.php file.

RobotsTxt - is a must have module for multi-site installs of Drupal. It allows you to edit your robots txt file from the Drupal Admin panel and not affect the robotstxt of the other sites. This is a have to item if you have multiple sites all running on one Drupal code base