Install Drupal on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

Objective

The objective is to install Drupal on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

Operating System and Software Versions

• Operating System: - Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver
• Software: - Drupal 8.4.5 or higher

Requirements

Privileged access to your Ubuntu System as root or via sudo command is required.

Difficulty

EASY

Conventions

• # - requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
• $ - requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Instructions

Prerequsites

Let's start by installing prerequisites. For the Drupal installation we will need curl and tasksel command. The following linux command will install both:

$ sudo apt install -y curl tasksel

This guide will use Ubuntu LAMP stack ( Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) to run under the Drupal installation.

If you wish to run Drupal using Nginx webserver then follow our guide on How To Install Nginx, MariaDB, PHP (LEMP stack) on Ubuntu 18.04.

Next, install Ubuntu LAMP stack using tasksel command and enable rewrite mode:

$ sudo tasksel install lamp-server
$ sudo a2enmod rewrite

Next, install additional PHP module Drupal requirements:

$ sudo apt install php-fdomdocument php-gd

We also need to enable "Clean URLS" for our Durpal installation. To do so edit /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf Apache's default site configuration file:

$ sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf

Once ready, add the following code below DocumentRoot /var/www/html line:

<Directory /var/www/html/>
           Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
           AllowOverride All
</Directory>

To apply the changes restart your Apache web server:

$ sudo systemctl restart apache2

We are now ready to download Drupal.

Download Drupal

At this stage we are ready to download and decompress the Drupal tarball into webserver's root directory. Start by downloading the latest Drupal package and save it into your /tmp directory using your web browser.

Alternatively, the bellow command is using curl to download Drupal tarball version 8.4.5:

$ curl --output /tmp/drupal.tar.gz https://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-8.4.5.tar.gz

Next, install Drupal files into Webserver's root directory /var/www/html and change the file ownership to www-data. Change your downloaded Drupal version number where appropriate:

$ sudo rm -fr /var/www/html
$ sudo tar xf /tmp/drupal.tar.gz -C /var/www/
$ sudo mv /var/www/drupal-8.4.5/ /var/www/html
$ sudo chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/html

All set, we are now ready to configure database for the Drupal installation.

Configure Database

In this section we will create a new MySQL database Drupal and assign a user access to it to a new user admin with password pass:

$ sudo mysqladmin create drupal
$ sudo mysql -e "CREATE USER 'admin'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'pass';"
$ sudo mysql -e "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON drupal.* TO 'admin'@'%' WITH GRANT OPTION;"

For more configuration options regarding MySQL database installation visit page: Install MySQL on Ubuntu 18.04.

Install Drupal

We are now ready to install Drupal.

Given that your Drupal server can be resolved via drupal-ubuntu host name, open up your browser and navigate to URL http://drupal-ubuntu to access Drupal installation wizard: To fix this issue we must edit the default Drupal configuration file /var/www/html/sites/default/settings.php.

$ sudo nano /var/www/html/sites/default/settings.php

Once ready, append the following code to the end of the file while updating your drupal website hostname/domain.

For example, for hostname drupal-ubuntu and domain linuxconfig.org add the following code.:

$settings['trusted_host_patterns'] = array(
    '^drupal-ubuntu$',
    '^www\.linuxconfig\.org$',
);

The above will add both drupal-ubuntu and domain linuxconfig.org as trusted hosts.