Installing Drupal on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) involves several steps:
1. Log in to your VPS: Connect to your VPS server using SSH. Ensure that you have all the necessary privileges to install software.
1. Update Your System:
Type in the following command to update your system:
```
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
```
1. Install LAMP stack: Drupal is a PHP-based application so you will need an Apache web server, PHP and MySQL/MariaDB to host the website.
If not already installed, you can install Apache, MySQL, and PHP by running the following commands:
```
sudo apt-get install apache2 mysql-server php php-mysql libapache2-mod-php php-gd
```
1. Download Drupal: Navigate to the /var/www/html folder and download the latest Drupal version from the official Drupal website using the `wget` command. You may need to change the Drupal version number in the command according to the latest version available.
```
sudo wget https://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.59.tar.gz
```
1. Unpack Drupal Files: Extract Drupal files to the Apache web server root directory.
```
sudo tar xzvf drupal-7.59.tar.gz
sudo mv drupal-7.59/* drupal-7.59/.htaccess /var/www/html
```
1. Configure MySQL Database: Log into MySQL to create a database and a user for Drupal.
```
mysql -u root -p
CREATE DATABASE drupal;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON drupal.* TO ‘drupaluser’@‘localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘your_password’;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;
```
1. Configure Apache to Serve Drupal:
Edit the 000-default.conf file.
```
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf
```
DocumentRoot should point to /var/www/html.
And add the following below DocumentRoot /var/www/html line.
```
AllowOverride All
```
Restart Apache service for the changes to take effect.
```
sudo systemctl restart apache2
```
1. Install Drupal: Now, open the web browser, and visit your server’s domain name or IP address to start the Drupal installation process. Fill all the necessary fields including database name, username, and password which we have created earlier.
1. Setup permissions: You may need to set up the correct permissions for the sites/default directory to allow the installer to write a settings.php configuration file.
1. Finish the setup: The Drupal installation wizard will guide you through the setup. You will be asked to fill in site and admin account information.
You have successfully installed Drupal on your VPS server.
Please note the above steps may vary depending on your linux distribution and the location of certain directories may not be the same. Ensure to replace ‘your\_password’ with a strong password.
Make sure to install all PHP specific requirements for Drupal. Check on the official Drupal webpage for any additional extensions that have to be installed for PHP.
