Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites. To install Drupal on your Netfirms account, please visit the Drupal Website to download a a copy of Drupal 6.4

If you have used this tutorial previously it was set up for Drupal 6.2 however a recent security update was released by the Drupal team so we are now using 6.4 as per their recommendation.

Click Here for the Netfirms Demo

Next we will upload the file to your Netfirms account using the File Manager or an FTP client. Put the file in your domains folder and then connect to your account via SSH. Drupal only offers a tarball and gzipped version of the file so it will need to be unpacked through the SSH command line.

Load "How to access your Netfirms account using SSH"

Once connected to our account, change directories to the folder where you uploaded the Drupal file to and type the following:

gzip -d drupal-6.4.tar.gz
tar -xvf drupal-6.4.tar

Which will unpack the files to a folder called /drupal-6.4/ on your account.

Now its time to create the database. Log in to your Netfirms Control Panel and create a new database with a descriptive name so you remember it belongs to Drupal. Take note of the database name, username and password that is generated and displayed at the top of the screen as we will need this during the installation process.

When ready, visit http://yourdoamin.com/drupal-6.4 where “yourdomain.com” is replaced with your actual domain name. Upon visiting that URL it will automatically prompt the installation process to begin with a screen that looks like this:

Click Install Drupal in English

The next screen you see is an added security feature for Drupal 6.4 .  It requires you to manually copy the default settings file to the correct location.  As per the instructions copy the file ./sites/default/default.settings.php to ./sites/default/settings.php

Depending on your account setup, you may receive the following warning message advising you that in order to continue register_globals must be turned off.

Load "How to turn off register_globals?"

After disabling register_globals click the try again link to move on to the next step. Here we will enter the database information that we gathered when creating a new database in the Netfirms Control Panel.

FIll in all of your administrative details on the next page and click save and continue found at the bottom.

That is it! All Done! Drupal has been installed. Visit http://yourdomain.com/drupal6-2 to see the installed copy.