How to install and configure Drupal on Ubuntu

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Developing your website from scratch can be a daunting task. It’s time-consuming and expensive if you are planning to hire a developer. An easy way to get your blog or website off the ground is using a CMS (content management system) like Drupal.

Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS), written in PHP and released under GPL. It was first released in January 2001 to power personal blogs, corporate websites, and any kind of websites that people may need. Today, Drupal is one of the most famous CMS in the world running millions of websites worldwide.

The latest version of Drupal at the time of writing this guide is Drupal 9.

Drupal Features

Free and open-source.
Basic features like the ability to publish posts, pages, and a comment system, RSS feed, user registration. install and modify templates & add-ons.
More than 30000 available modules to download for free from the Drupal store.
Available in more than 110 languages with support for RTL languages like Arabic.
Multi-site support and Multi-user content editing and creation support.
Support for creating blogs, forums, polls using modules that are installed by default.
Very-well updates system to notify you about security updates.
Many other features.

There are some steps to setup Drupal on Ubuntu:

Step 1: Update the System

$ apt update

Step 2:Install Apache2

$ apt install apache2

Start & Enable the Apache2 service.

$ systemctl start apache2
$ systemctl enable apache2

Step 3: Install PHP

$ apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-cli php-fpm php-json php-common php-mysql php-zip php-gd php-intl php-mbstring php-curl php-xml php-pear php-tidy php-soap php-bcmath php-xmlrpc

Step 4: Install MySQL Server

$ apt install mysql-server

Start & Enable the MySQL server.

$ systemctl start mysql
$ systemctl enable mysql

Step 5: Configure the MySQL Database.

$ mysql -u root -p

Provide the Password or Press the Enter.
Here is the command output.

Create a User & Set a password.

CREATE USER drupal@localhost IDENTIFIED BY "your password_here";

Create database.

create database drupal;

Run Grant all privileges command

GRANT ALL ON drupal.* TO drupal@localhost;

Run Flush privileges & Exit commands.

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

exit

Note: If you want, you can replace the user name and database name with any other name.

Here is the command output.

Step 6: Now Download the Drupal on system.

$ wget https://www.drupal.org/download-latest/tar.gz -O drupal.tar.gz

Here is the command output.

Extract the downloaded folder.

$ tar -xvf drupal.tar.gz

Move the extracted folder to /var/www/html/.

$ mv drupal-9.4.8 /var/www/html/drupal

Provide the following permissions.

$ chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/drupal/
$ chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/drupal/

Here is the command output.

Step 7: Configure the Apache virtual host file.

Create a file.

$ nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/drupal.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin [email protected]
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/drupal/
ServerName example.com
ServerAlias www.example.com
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
<Directory /var/www/html/drupal/>
Options FollowSymlinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/html/>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Save and exit the configuration file.