Drupal 6.x multi-site on a Windows PC

The key to learning the ropes on Drupal is setting up a good test/development environment on your PC, and for me, Drupal's multi-site feature has become the vital tool in this regard. I just wished I had done this earlier, so I'm posting the following guide in the hope that it might help save time and headaches for other Drupal newcomers.

Multi-site is not exactly as easy as some Drupal experts suggest, so why bother? Because it allows you to try things and, well, stuff up as much as you like. The strategy works like this: You keep your original Drupal installation clean and untouched, and do your work on a second site (or a third or as many as you like). If a site doesn't work out, you simply remove that particular site and try again -- without having reinstall Drupal and all your contributed modules and themes again (if they're installed in Drupal's sites/all/modules and sites/all/themes folders).

So let's start. You'll first need to an install Apache, PHP and MySQL, and the easiest way to do this is with a pre-packaged 'AMP' setup. For the following guide, I've used my favourite package, WampServer. The technique should also work with others, such as Xampp, with some minor differences such as some of the paths, but it's strictly for Windows Vista or XP PCs only. (Nothing against MacOS or Linux, but Vista was preinstalled on my laptop).

1. Install WampServer (or another 'AMP' package). Then make sure the Apache and MySQL services are running, and start phpMyAdmin in your browser (the URL should be something like http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ or it can be launched via the WampServer icon in your system tray). Create a new database -- we'll call it drupal6 because this will be our base installation which we will leave untouched. While you're here create a second and third database, which we'll call site1 and site2, as these will be our first two test sites. You can also change the database privileges if you want, but to keep things simple here, we'll stick with the default user, root, and no password.

2. Download Drupal 6 into WampServer's wamp/www folder (or the htdocs folder in Xampp and some other packages). (You'll need a tool like 7-zip to unpack the Drupal tar.gz file).

3. Do your first Drupal installation by pointing your browser to your Drupal folder, which should be something like http://localhost/drupal-6.x. Use the drupal6 database with the database user settings (root and no password in this example). Fully complete the installation, but then leave it alone.

4. Find Drupal's sites folder, make a copy of the default folder and rename it to the URL you want for your first test. To keep it simple, we'll make it the same as the first test site database: site1. While you're here, create files, tmp and themes sub-folders within this new folder. The themes sub-folder will be used for any custom theme you create specifically for this site. Similarly, you can create a modules sub-folder for any module you use only with this site. However, generally, I find it easier to keep all contributed modules together in the sites/all/modules folder so I can use them with all my test sites.

5. Use a text editor to open the settings.php file in your new site1 folder and change $db_url line to reflect your first test site database, and the dabatase user name and password, eg:

$db_url = 'mysql://root@localhost/site1';

(If you added a password to the database username, add this to the line, eg: mysql://username:password@localhost/site1).

Also, change the $base_url to the above site URL, eg:

$base_url = 'http://site1'; // NO trailing slash!

Repeat steps 4 and 5 for the other test site (site2).

4. Find the Windows hosts file, which should be in Windows' System32/drivers/etc folder, make a backup of that file and then open the hosts file in a text editor. Here, add new lines mapping your localhost IP address to match the URLs of your test sites and your original Drupal site. In our example, it would look like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 site1
127.0.0.1 site2
127.0.0.1 drupal6

5. Find the Apache httpd.conf file which, in WampServer, should be in the wamp/bin/ApacheX.X/conf folder (where X.X is the Apache version number). Sorry, I can't remember where Xampp installs this, but it will be in the Apache folder. Anyway, all you need to do here is make sure the "Virtual hosts" line is active by removing the # before Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf.

6. Make a backup of that httpd-vhosts.conf file (which is in Apache's conf/extra folder), then open httpd-vhosts.conf with a text editor and add these lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot C:/wamp/www/drupal-6.x
ServerName site1
<VirtualHost>

where C:/wamp/www/drupal-6.x is the path to the Drupal installation folder and site1 is the URL for your first test site. Add another entry for your other test site, another entry for your original Drupal installation and another entry for WampServer's localhost URL (if you want to keep this active), eg:

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot C:/wamp/www/drupal-6.x
ServerName site2
<VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot C:/wamp/www/drupal-6.x
ServerName drupal6
<VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot C:/wamp/www
ServerName localhost
<VirtualHost>

7. Restart Apache for the changes to take effect. With WampServer, this is done by selecting the WampServer icon in the system tray and then "Restart all services".

8. Now you're ready to install each Drupal test site using your browser, eg:

http://site1/install.php

http://site2/install.php

And that's it. As I said, it's not exactly simple, but it's well worth the effort. Now you can do whatever you like with your test sites. If you mess up with, say, site1, just delete the site1 folder, the site1 database in phpMyAdmin and the site1 entries in the Windows hosts and Apache httpd-vhosts.conf files and start again. Alternatively, if a site works out and you want to go live with it, the multi-site approach makes this easier (in my opinion).

One final caveat: I'm no expert. This technique works for me, but I'd welcome any feedback, especially if there are any accuracies.