Installing Drupal with Plesk
Drupal is a content management system (CMS) that helps you manage your website’s look and content. If you aren’t familiar with CMSes, check out What Is a Content Management System (CMS)? to decide if Drupal is right for you.
Installing Drupal on your domain is simple at Liquid Web. Plesk installs packages so you don’t have to download and install them manually. Plesk also walks you through installing Drupal, choosing some basic settings, and setting up an administrator account.
You can install applications in two ways: Quick or Custom.
* The Quick installation will use the default settings to install the latest version of the application. This will automatically create an administrator account for the application.
* The Custom installation has more flexibility. You can choose administrator credentials, choose where the application is installed, and change other options, depending on the application. Sometimes you’ll also be able to choose to install a different Version of an application.
This walkthrough will cover the Custom installation.
- Log into Plesk. If you have never logged into Plesk, read Getting Started with Plesk first.
- In Power User view, click on Applications in the left navigation menu. This will open the Plesk applications installer. In Service Provider view, click on Subscriptions in the left navigation menu. Then, click on the domain where you’d like to install Drupal and click on the Applications tab.
- Click on Featured Applications and find Drupal. (You can also click on All Available Applications and search for “Drupal.”)
- Click on the ‘-‘ icon and then choose Install (Custom).
- Read and accept the Drupal license agreement.
- Now, choose where you’d like to install Drupal. You can install it Drupal on your main domain, on a subdomain, or in a directory (on a certain page of your site).
- Next, check the box to automatically update Drupal in the Update Settings section. This will help protect your site from malicious attacks.
- There are two different ways to set up administrative access for Drupal. You can connect administrative access to a current Plesk account or you can set up an account that’s not connected to a Plesk user.
- Now you’ll set up your Main configuration settings.
- Choose the Administrator’s email.
- Choose a Site name. You can change this at any time.
- Choose an Interface language.
- Drupal will automatically create the necessary databases. If you’d like, you can change the database name and user account information.
- Click Install to continue.
- Once your installation has completed, you’ll see the URL of your Drupal installation. Go to this URL to make sure Drupal is installed how you want it to be installed.
You’ve successfully installed Drupal on your domain. Now you can start exploring how to develop your site and create content!
Administrative Access
There are security advantages to setting up a totally separate administrative account for Drupal. If your Plesk accounts are ever compromised, you will still have administrative access to your Drupal account. On the other hand, connecting Drupal to a Plesk user makes it one less username and password to remember! Decide which one will work best for you for each application.
- If you are creating unconnected administrative credentials, choose an Administrative username and then choose and confirm an Administrative password.
- If you’re going to make a Plesk user the Drupal administrator, click the radio button next to Grant administrative access to existing user. Then, use the dropdown menu to select a user.
