Drupal is the best content management system I have ever come across. It has all the features necessary to build any website. Drupal can save you thousands of dollars in development costs by simplifying the development of complex applications and portal websites. The drupal community has created thousands of plugins which can be configured to achieve any functionality desired in a content management system. This article will show you how to install Drupal on your shared hosting server. This article will show you how to install drupal in a shared hosting server.

Step 1: Download And Extract Drupal From Drupal.org

Go to the drupal download page and download the latest version of drupal. Extract the file to a local folder.

Step 2: Upload the files to the server.

Use a reliable FTP client like FileZilla to connect to your shared hosting server. On your browser, browse to the directory which is the root of the domain name. If you are installing in a subdirectory or in a subdomain switch to the directory that corresponds to the subdomain. Upload the drupal files to the said directory. For illustration, I am going to use the domain name http://www.droople.com. This maps to /public_html/droople.com in the FTP directory where I am going to upload my drupal files.

So I will see my drupal site at http://www.droople.com

Step 3: Creating a mysql user and database.

1. Go to http://www.droople.com/cpanel or whatever your hosting provides for administering your server.
2. Go to MySQL databases.

   

3. There create a new database.

   

4. Create a new user (remember the password, you will need it). Make sure you don’t use a password that you use for sites or your email accounts. This will be stored in a text file in the server. If you later hire a programmer to do something on your site, they can see the password.

   

5. Add full permissions to the database to the database user you just created.

   

   

Usually shared hosting servers prepend your hosting’s user name to the database name. So if you create mysite. The cpanel will create white_mysite. If ‘white’ is your username of the hosting server. The same goes with the username of the databse server.

Enter the address of the directory/domain name in the browser.

http://www.droople.com

You will see the following screen:

Click on “Install Drupal in English”. You will see the following screen:

Don’t be alarmned! Seeing this is normal. Use your ftp client to switch to sites/default directory in your drupal installation directory (on the server). Download the default.settings.php file to your computer. Rename it as settings.php and upload it to the same directory. Now refresh the page showing the error above. Now you will see the following page:

Enter the database username and password you just created at the MySQL Databases section of the control panel. The form shown below follows:

Fill up the form with the necessary details take particular care in enering the Adminstrator’s account email address by making sure its a real email address and use a password you can remember as you will needed it to administer the website. You will see the following message with or without the error message depending on your server’s configuration.

Click on “your new site” and go to the newly installed drupal site!