Table of contents
- 1. How to start/stop the servers?
- 2. How to change the default URL to root?
- 2.1. Automatic approach
- 2.2. Manual approach
- 3. How to create a full backup of Drupal?
- 4. How to upgrade Drupal?
- 5. How to install a plugin on Drupal?
- 6. How to configure the email settings of Drupal?
- 7. How to translate Drupal to my language?
- 8. How to integrate Solr with Drupal?
- 9. How to enable SSL?
- 10. How to debug errors?
- 11. How to increase the allowed size of the uploaded files?
| How-To Guides | Upgrade AMI guide
Migration from local installation to the cloud
|
Drupal is a content management platform that allows an individual or community of users to easily publish, manage, and organize a wide variety of content on a website. In general, Drupal is used for community web portals, discussion sites, corporate web sites, intranet applications, personal web sites or blogs, aficionado sites, e-commerce applications, resource directories, and social networking sites. Drupal is easy to extend by plugging in one or more of the dozens of freely available modules.
Please, take a look to the Quick Start Guide to know the basic use of this Stack.
How to start/stop the servers?
The Stacks include a graphical tool to manage the servers easily. You can find the "manager-windows.exe", "manager-osx" or "manager-linux" tool in your installation directory. Using this tool, you can Start, Stop or Restart the servers and check the log files. You can click on the icon to start it.
On Windows: You can also start the Manager tool from shortcuts: Start -> Program Files -> BitNami Stack -> Manager tool
If you prefer, you can use the "ctlscript.sh" utility from the command line. This script is in the installation directory.
On OS X: You can start the Manager tool from the installation directory or you can use the "ctlscript.sh" utility from a Terminal.
host:~ user$ cd /Applications/application-version host:~ user$ ./ctlscript.sh start
On Linux:
$ cd ~/applicaton-version $ ./ctlscript.sh start
How to change the default URL to root?
Automatic approach
The Virtual Appliances, BitNami Cloud Hosting and AMI images ship a tool called "updateip". Using this tool you be able to configure the URL automatically. It includes a new option to remove the "/drupal" prefix from the URL. If you want to modify that you can run the following command:
$ sudo /opt/bitnami/apps/drupal/updateip --appurl /
Now you will be able to access to the Drupal application at http://YOUR_DOMAIN instead of http://YOUR_DOMAIN/drupal.
On Windows:
This tool is also included for Windows. You can open the "Use BitNami Drupal Stack" command prompt from the Windows shortcuts and run the following comand:
> cd apps\drupal > updateip.exe --base_directory "C:\Program Files\BitNami Drupal Stack" --appurl /
Manual approach
1) An easy approach to have your application in the root URL is to uncomment the following lines in your application configuration file /installdir/apps/drupal/conf/drupal.conf. This approach only changes the initial page of your application, not the internal urls, all the links point to "http://yourdomain/drupal". If you do not see these lines you can add them at the end of the file. Note that "drupal" could be wordpress, joomla, drupal, etc.
# Uncomment the following lines to see your application in the root # of your URL. This is not compatible with more than one application. RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^/$ /drupal/ [PT]
Using this configuration and restarting the Apache server you can see your initial page of your application in the root URL.
2) Another option is to configure your application to run in the root URL directly. The details are described below (if you have already configured the application using the first method, note that you have to revert the change before continuing with this approach).
If you want to change the default URL from http://your_domain/drupal to http://your_domain, you should add a "DocumentRoot" entry in your application conf file. Edit the /installdir/apps/drupal/conf/drupal.conf file to add this line and commenting the "Alias" entries.
drupal.conf file content:
DocumentRoot "/installdir/apps/drupal/htdocs" # Alias /drupal/ "/installdir/apps/drupal/htdocs/" # Alias /drupal "/installdir/apps/drupal/htdocs" (..)
Some applications also require changes in their configuration files or in the database.
If you want to change the default URL from http://your_domain/drupal to http://your_domain, you should add a "DocumentRoot" entry in your application conf file. Edit the /opt/bitnami/apps/drupal/conf/drupal.conf file to add this line and commenting the "Alias" entries. You can use the "nano" editor:
$ sudo nano /opt/bitnami/apps/drupal/conf/drupal.conf
drupal.conf file content:
DocumentRoot "/opt/bitnami/apps/drupal/htdocs" # Alias /drupal/ "/installdir/apps/drupal/htdocs/" # Alias /drupal "/installdir/apps/drupal/htdocs" (...)
Some applications also require changes in their configuration files or in the database.
If you want to change the default URL from http://your_domain/drupal to http://your_domain, you should add a "DocumentRoot" entry in your application conf file. Edit the /opt/bitnami/apps/drupal/conf/drupal.conf file to add this line and commenting the "Alias" entries. You can use the "nano" command line editor or you can also edit this file from your favorite FTP program.
$ sudo nano /opt/bitnami/apps/drupal/conf/drupal.conf
drupal.conf file content:
DocumentRoot "/opt/bitnami/apps/drupal/htdocs" # Alias /drupal/ "/installdir/apps/drupal/htdocs/" # Alias /drupal "/installdir/apps/drupal/htdocs" (...)
Some applications also require changes in their configuration files or in the database.
In this case it is also necessary to modify the following lines in "installdir/apps/drupal/htdocs/.htaccess" file:
#Base RewriteBase /drupal ... Base RewriteBase /
Finally restart the Apache server:
$ /installdir/ctlscript.sh restart apache
How to create a full backup of Drupal?
Because BitNami stacks are self-contained, the simplest option for performing your backups is to copy or compress the BitNami Stack installation directory. To do so in a safe manner, you will need to stop all servers, so this method may not be appropriate if you have people accessing the application continously.
On Linux and OS X:
$ cd installdir $ ./ctlscript.sh stop $ cp -r installdir application-backup
Or you can create a tarball:
$ tar -czvf application-backup.tar.gz installdir
Or a zip file:
$ zip -r application-backup.zip installdir/*
To restore this backup you only need to uncompress the backup in the same location. It is important to use the same path that was used when the stack was originally installed.
For example if you have a backup in a Red Hat machine, you can copy it to an Ubuntu Linux machine (a different distro!) in the same location. Then start the servers and that’s all.
$ cd installdir $ ./ctlscript.sh start
You just need to be carefull to keep the same permissions for the files and folders. If you installed as root make sure that in the new machine you copy the files also as root. And this case, if you are also moving MySQL or PostgreSQL, you will need to create those users in the new machine (if they don't exist yet).
On Windows:
On Windows, you should follow the same process. Stop the servers using the shortcuts and copy the whole installation directory. To restore the system, copy the directory to a different Windows machine in the same location and follow these steps from a command prompt:
$ cd installdir $ serviceinstall.bat INSTALL
You can access your BitNami Application at the usual URL.
If you want to create only a database backup, check the following link for MySQL /Components/MySQL#How_to_create_a_database_backup or for PostgreSQL
/Components/PostgreSQL#How_to_create_a_database_backup.3fHow to upgrade Drupal?
It is strongly recommended that you create a backup before starting the update process. If you have important data, it is advisable that you create and try to restore a backup to ensure that everything works properly.
There are two different ways to upgrade your application.
- If you want to upgrade the application and all Stack components PHP, Ruby, MySQL, Apache… You can follow the steps described at How to upgrade the full Stack migrating the data?
- In case you only want to upgrade the application code without modifying any other Stack components, you should follow the guide which is in the application page itself.
In the Drupal case you can find the upgrade steps at http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/UPGRADE.txt
How to install a plugin on Drupal?
To install a module in Drupal it is necessary to copy and uncompress it in the installdir/apps/drupal/htdocs/modules folder. Then you can enable the Module in the Modules section in the Drupal administration panel.
BitNami Drupal virtual appliances and AMIs have already installed and configured a FTP server, so you can install modules from the Administration panel.
How to configure the email settings of Drupal?
It is necessary to install the SMTP module in a Drupal installation. You should download and install the following modules:
- SMTP Authentication Support Module for Drupal (http://drupal.org/project/smtp)
- PHPmailer package from SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...group_id=26031). This module is already included in Drupal since 7.0 version.
To install:
- Upload SMTP Module zip/tar file to your Drupal installation's 'sites/all/modules' directory and unzip. (Previous Drupal version have the modules already installed in "/modules" folder).
- Create a folder called phpmailer in your new sites/all/modules/smtp directory.
- Upload the PHPmailer zip/tar file to sites/all/modules/smtp/phpmailer and unzip to that directory.
To configure:
- In Drupal, go to Administer/Site Building/Modules and enable SMTP Authentication Support.
- Now go to Administer 'by Module' tab, scroll down to SMTP Authentication Support and click on 'SMTP Authentication Support'.
- Enter the following configuration options. I configure it using a gmail account.
- SMTP Server - smtp.gmail.com
- SMTP backup server - leave blank
- SMTP port - 465
- Use encrypted protocol - Use SSL
- Username - your GoogleApps or Gmail email account in full (yourname@gmail.com; yourname@yourdomain)
- Password - your GoogleApps or Gmail password
- email from address - the email address you want messages to appear to be from (e.g. no-reply@yourdomain or your actual address)
- E-mail from name - the name you want emails to appear to be from (e.g. 'Yourdomain Support' or your real name)
- Send test email
How to translate Drupal to my language?
BitNami Drupal has already installed English and Spanish translations currently and we will work for adding more languages. If you want to change the Drupal language you can do that from the administration interface:
- Configuration -> Modules -> Enable Locale module
- Configuration -> Languages -> Add a Language
- Choose your language and that's all
How to integrate Solr with Drupal?
BitNami Drupal 7 ships a plugin to allow the integration between a BitNami Solr 3 AMI and a BitNami Drupal 7 AMI. To do so, the following steps must be followed.
First, start two instances from the Amazon console, one with Drupal and one with Solr. You can search by name in the Community AMIs listings or you can start them directly from the BitNami Drupal and Solr pages. In this case, we will start an EBS image with Ubuntu 64 bit.
The BitNami Drupal Stack already has the Apache Solr Search Integration module installed, so you just need to enable the Solr Search and Access modules. If you do not have this module installed, you can install it from the Administration panel.
$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart solr
In the Solr admin panel, you should now see something like "drupal-3.0-beta16" or "drupal-3.0-0-solr3". If this is the case, everything is ready on the Solr side.
How to enable SSL?
You can see how to configure Apache to enable SSL connections at How to enable SSL to access through https?
How to debug errors?
Once Apache starts, it will create two log files, the access_log and the error_log /installdir/apache2/logs directory. You can change these files to see the exact error in the application.
The main MySQL log file is created at /installdir/mysql/data/mysqld.log file.
How to increase the allowed size of the uploaded files?
You can modify the following option in the php.ini file to increase the allowed size for uploads:
; Maximum size of POST data that PHP will accept. post_max_size = 16M ... ; Maximum allowed size for uploaded files. upload_max_filesize = 16M
Comments