Last updated May 17, 2012. Created by LeeHunter on April 25, 2008.
Edited by silverwing, shayeedmomin, Heine, nevets. Log in to edit this page.
Hosting note
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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.
See also
The troubleshooting FAQ.
Comments
Need page to profile differences between releases
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
@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