Host Your Website Using Drupal CMS on Ubuntu Server

Hosting a website is very crucial job which can change your entire career path or can help your business to grow beyond limits. Larger companies and organizations generally have professionals to setup the website but what about small industries and people who cannot afford professions. In this scenario CMS like Drupal and Joomla!comes to rescue.

First of all let us talk about CMS. CMS stands for Content Management System. Its a collection of tools which give you "Click Next" interface for website creation. You will most generally, get a php interface and mysql or postgre sql databse connectivity. Creation and inclusion of forum or wiki is as simple as selecting a check box. You can create user, decide their roles, ban them or give them permission to add pages to your website. And here is the best part, you don't need to know any programming language or some complicated sql queries to use a CMS like Drupal. So without wasting any time let us start creating our website.

1.  First of all we need to install the required packages. For this use the following command :-
   sudo apt-get install apache2 php5-mysql php5-gd libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server
2. You will need to set the mysql user id and password. For this fire the following command :-
   mysql -u root
   mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('yourpassword');
   The output should be :-
   
   
   
   Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
   
   Quit the mysql prompt:
   
   mysql> \q
   
   
3. If you don't know how to configure Apache manually then download webmin. It is a complete Server management utility.
4. Using webmin configure apache. You can do so by clicking to servers tab and clicking apache. You have to provide server address and document root. Document root is a folder in which all the website files are kept.
5. Download Drupal. It is recommended that you go through the ReadMe's first but if you are too lazy for that then continue reading.
6. Extract drupal at your document root and rename default.settings.php file in the sites/default to settings.php
7. Go to your document root and fire the follwing commands :-
   chmod o+w sites/default
   chmod o+w sites/default/settings.php
   This gives the webserver the permission to modify your files.
8. Read  INSTALL.mysql.txt for instruction on setting up mysql server.
   
9. Now preparations are finished. Lets start the real work. Open your website. You will get a page asking you to install in english. Click on it if you want an english install. 
10. You will be presented with some "simple to fill" forms. Fill in with correct details and there you have!!
11. Now login into drupal using the id you created while filling in the form and start creating pages.

This is how you can get your website up in no time. And yes, it is as easy as it sounds!!!