How To Install Drupal on Debian 10

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Drupal on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Drupal is an open-source and one of the most popular PHP-based content management systems (CMS) platforms for building personal blogs or big corporate websites. It has thousands of templates and plugins that are mostly free to download and install. Due to the stability of the base, the adaptability of the platform, and its active community, Drupal remains a popular choice after more than a decade on the scene.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Drupal open source CMS on a Debian 10 (Buster).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 10 (Buster).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Drupal on Debian 10 Buster

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing the LAMP stack.

A Debian 10 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, Please read our previous tutorial to install LAMP Server on Debian 10.

Step 3. Installing Drupal on Debian 10.

Now we going to download Drupal’s compressed file from Drupal’s Official site using the wget command:

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

Once the download is complete, extract it in your directory:

sudo tar -xvf drupal.tar.gz
sudo mv drupal-9.0.7 /var/www/html/drupal

We will need to change some folders permissions:

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

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Drupal.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for Drupal. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Drupal installation:

MariaDB [(none)]> create USER ‘drupal_user’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY “Your_Strong_Password”;
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL ON drupal_db.* TO ‘drupal_user’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY “password”;
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> EXIT;

Step 5. Configuring Apache for Drupal.

You need to create a new virtual host directive in Apache for your domain. You can create the file with your favorite text editor. For example, we are using nano:

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

Paste the content shown on the virtual host file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerAdmin admin@example.com
     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>

Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

sudo a2ensite drupal.conf
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Step 6. Installing an SSL certificate.

In this step, we will install the SSL (TLS) certificate. We will use a free Let’s Encrypt certificate that will work in all browsers and the CertBot application to install the certificate and keep it updated:

sudo apt install certbot python-certbot-apache

Next, run the certbot a command that will download the certificate and create the Apache configuration to use the certificate:

sudo certbot --apache

You will then be prompted to enter an email address for the certificate. After you have entered that you must agree to the T&C’s and decide if you want to share your email address with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This last step is optional. Once successfully, Reload Apache again to load all the new configuration:

sudo systemctl reload apache2

Step 7. Accessing the Drupal Web Interface.

Drupal will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to https://your-domain.com or https://server-ip-address/ and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open ports 80 and 443 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Drupal. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Drupal open source CMS on Debian 10 Buster. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Drupal website.