Creating multiple drupal sites on the local machine

This is supplementary information on the article listed at: http://drupal.org/node/120647

So there were a few things that I had trouble with:

1. Copy the database to a new database.
   This step kept failing saying that I was failing a constraint test (it said I had a duplicate key). I don't really really see why it failing considering that my users table only had 2 users. The first user was actually a blank row, that had only the default values. This seemed to have been the initialize drupal installation.
   
   So to solve this, I went into the database and literally just deleted that row. And when I now tried to copy the database to a new database, it worked.
   


2. Modifying the httpd-vhosts.conf and hosts file
   It says to comment out existing lines, but I was using the Apache 2.2.6 which had them uncommented anyways. This file is not used anyways unless you tell it to be used in the httpd.conf file which is configured in an early step.
   
   For each new site, you need to add this:
   

   
   <VirtualHost *:80>
   DocumentRoot /www/drupal/
   ServerName databasename
   </VirtualHost>
   

   
   
   What this actually does it set the location of the files to be accessed when someone tries to access the server name. This actually is in relationship with the hosts file in the /windows/system32/drivers/etc directory.
   
   

   I had this annoying problem with vista where I couldn't edit the file because I didn't have permissions. So I just copied and pasted the file on my desktop. Opened it, edited it and the pasting it back in the same directory effectively overwriting it

   
   
   If you look at this file you should see some lines like this:
   
   

   
   127.0.0.1 localhost
   ::1 localhost
   127.0.0.1 how_far_are_you
   127.0.0.1 drupal_test_database
   

   
   
   This maps IP address to host names (Servers). The number 127.0.0.1 means localhost, and then we say that this IP address can map to three servers: localhost, how_far_are_you, and drupal_test_database.
   
   Where are these locations/Servers? Well they are actually on your machine!!! These are specified in your httpd-vhosts.conf file above. Each server must be listed with:
   
   

   
   <VirtualHost *:80>
   DocumentRoot /www/drupal/
   ServerName databasename
   </VirtualHost>
   

   
   
   So for example:
   
   

   
   <VirtualHost *:80>
   DocumentRoot ""D:\web\webserver\htdocs\drupal-6.2"
   ServerName how_far_are_you
   </VirtualHost>
   

   
   
   This says that this server "how_far_are_you" is located at the file location specified under document root. For another drupal site, we do exactly the same thing, expect the servername is just different (it is the database name)
   
   So the interesting thing is that they both point to the same document root. In order to differentiate the two different sites, we use the database names.
   
   

   Actually now that I think about it. I think it just matches the name of the site folder (ie .drupal/sites/site_name). Because the settings.php file handles the database name connection. Haven't confirmed this yet though.

   
   
   One thing I want to mention is that because turn this virtual host thingy on, typing in http://localhost no longer works. You actually have to add the line:
   
   

   
   <VirtualHost *:80>
   DocumentRoot ""D:\web\webserver\htdocs"
   ServerName localhost
   </VirtualHost>
   

   
   
   For it to work. I think this was taking care of when the virtual host feature wasn't turned on.
   

This is a pretty interesting thing, and it also allows to just declare like domain names to point to different document roots on the local computer. This is essentially how virtual servers work (where one machine hosts multiple sites!)

One interesting thing I tried to do was skip the part about editing the host file, and see what happened if I just typed in http://name_of_servername. It didn't worked and it searched the web actually. I suspect that part is necessary, because typing in http://... causes it to first search your local machine for valid servername. So the host file is necessary

Drupal - Getting Started

Once I followed the video to install Drupal, I ran into this problem where when I tried to click on any link in the index.php file in the drupal directory it would lead me right back to a view of the directory.

I suspected this has something to do with the fact that I didn't my local installation of apache to serve the index.php file if it was present (similar to how index.html is the file to be served when the user first enters that directory.

So going into my httpd.conf file, I searched for the line "DirectoryIndex", and then modified it to include index.php:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

Note how index.html was already being served. And when I went back to my drupal directory and tried a link, it worked!

GD Library Not Found
Upon entering the administrator page, I found that I had some status errors right off the bat. Clicking on the link to see what status errors there were, I found one to say that my "GD Library" was not found. This is an image library that is required for drupal to do some image manipulation for some themes or maybe so content. Anyways, the version of PHP 5.2.5 that I am using actually has this library but it is turned off by default.

So go to the php.ini file, and search for the line "extension=php_gd2.dll" and then there should be a semicolon right before it. Just remove the semicolon and then try it again and that should fix the problem.