How To Install Drupal on Debian 9 Stretch

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Drupal on Debian 9 Stretch. 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 on a Debian 9 (Stretch) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 9 (Stretch).
• 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 9 Stretch

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

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP)  server.

A Debian 9 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, Please read our previous tutorial to install LAMP Server on Debian 9.

Step 3. Installing Drupal on Debian 9.

The first thing to do is to go to Drupal’s download page and download the latest stable version of Drupal, At the moment of writing this article it is version 8.5.5:

wget https://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-8.5.5.zip

Unpack the Drupal archive to the document root directory in your server:

unzip drupal*.zip
cp -rf drupal*/* /var/www/html/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

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

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:

create database drupal;
grant all privileges on drupal.* to drupaluser@localhost identified by 'your_password';
flush privileges;
exit

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server 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:

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/your_domain.conf

Replace your_domain with your actual domain name and paste the following into the file:

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerAdmin webmaster@your_domain
ServerName your_domain

DocumentRoot /var/www/html/

<Directory /var/www/html/>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /mysite
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
</Directory>

</VirtualHost>

Activate the rewrite module and enable your new virtual host directive:

a2enmod rewrite
a2ensite your_domain.conf

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

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Accessing Drupal.

Drupal will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com or http://your-server-ip-address and complete the required steps to finish the installation. Remember that you’ll need the database name, username, and password you created earlier to connect. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Drupal. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Drupal content management system (CMS) Debian 9 Stretch. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Drupal website.

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