Setting up drupal multisite on localhost

This blog post will guide you through the process of creating multisite on localhost. I usually have a couple of drupal installations in my laptop one for each branch of modules that i maintain and rest for testing new drupal themes and modules. I wanted to avoid downloading / upgrading the redundant copy of drupal core so i decided to give a try to drupal multisite feature.

Lets take my GSoC quiz module as an example to explain this. We quiz module developers support branch quiz 3.x and 4.x at the time of writing this blog post. I would like to have quiz-3.x installation at http://quiz3dev and 4.x at http://quiz4dev.

Note: There is no .com or .net domain. It is in local host and similar to http://localhost

The LAMP stack used here is Ubuntu 9.10, PHP 5.2 and Apache 2.x. My Apache's document root is at /home/sivaji/Public/ and the version of drupal that we will be using here is drupal 6.x.

Step 1: Downloading

Lets grab the recent version of drupal. Usually I use drush to install drupal core and modules. Terminal for creating database and file operation.

Step 2:

This will create a directory named drupal-6.15 containing drupal 6.15 code base. Lets rename this directory to d6

Step 3: Directory Structure

To create the directory structure necessary for multisite.

Step 3.1

Lets create settings.php and files directory for default installation and assign 777 permission for drupal installer to write configurations.

step 3.2

Repeat step 3.1 for site quiz3dev and quiz4dev.

Step 4: Database

We will create databases necessary for each site in this step.

For default installation

For quiz3dev site

For quiz4dev site

Step 5: Virtual Directory

Adding virtual directory to apache configuration file. On ubuntu 9.10 the apache configuration file resides at /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

step 6: Host File

We need to add some entries in host file /etc/hosts to map the new domain name quiz3dev and quiz4dev to IP 127.0.0.1

Now we need to restart the apache server to let the changes reflect.

Step 7: Installation

We are down to finish the multisite setup, now typing http://quiz3dev in browser address bar should show up a drupal installation page.

The installation procedure is very similar to usual installation, except the site specific module and themes should go into appropriate directory.

For example quiz module version 3.x should go into sites/quiz3dev/modules and 4.x to sites/quiz4dev/modules. Neighborhood modules like Devel, Gradebook, Charts can stay in sites/all/module. This makes it possible to share the Neighborhood modules across the site.

Hope this will help the fellow drupal module maintainers.