Installing Drupal onto a Dreamhost site?

[EdwardMartinIII]

Anyone do this?

I find some old support pages complaining about it, but they're usually pretty old.

It's my understanding that if one wants to do a lot of custom fiddling, one has to simply do the installation oneself, instead of using Dreamhost's one-click install.

What I really NEED, however, is to know how (if) I can install Drupal to some sort of sandbox area, so I don't screw up the site as-is. If I screw up the existing site (which is all flat HTML files), then my boss will skin me alive.

Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?


Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[spamjim]

I'm not familiar with Dreamhost but there are a couple options for testing Drupal on an existing site. Check your host's control panel to see if any of these options work.

1) Set up a subdomain like

http://drupaltest.yourdomain.com

2) Set up a subfolder like

http://www.yourdomain.com/drupaltest

In either of these cases, the Drupal files might be stored in a subfolder like /home/yourname/htdocs/drupaltest/

The files would be separate from your existing site files.

The first option is more ideal as it should be easy to switch active sites through the host's control panel.

 

[EdwardMartinIII]

Thanks!

At the moment, I'm experimenting with a subdirectory, just to learn Drupal. It allows me to nuke the whole thing and reinstall from scratch a lot of times (which is actually useful for me to learn).

At some point in the future, I'm going to have to do it For Real, and I'd like to be able to effect a transfer as quickly as possible.

I have a feeling my client is going to want a LOT of fiddling with the Drupal site before he approves the use of it for the ACTUAL website, and then (assuming he approves), he'll want the changeover to happen FAST.

Do you ever do that sort of thing? Is it usually just a matter of fiddling with db entries, or is there something more complicated I better keep in mind NOW?

Thanks!




Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[spamjim]

Supposing that you eventually move the Drupal installation files from the subfolder to the httdocs root directory to replace the older site, it is possible to run a query on the database to replace any hard coded instances of "/yourtestsubfolder" to "/".

 

[EdwardMartinIII]

Oh neat! I hadn't thought of that. My db experience is pretty infant-like, so this is new and somewhat scary ground.


Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door