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Setup drupal sandbox on your laptop

Submitted by iniunet on Wed, 08/19/2009 - 20:34

It has been annoying to connect to the web hosting to test different module and functionality of drupal, web hosting machine is not so convinient comparing to our own laptop, It will be great if we could just setup drupal to play with on our own laptop.

My first thought is to download XAMMP for windows, an exellent integrated enviroment that meet drupal 's all installation requirement with pre-integrated apache, php and mysql. Unfortunetly It seems that XAMMP on windows does not runs so good and when I enable a few modules at the same time, Druapl seems to hang there with no response(It is proved to be related to the php.ini setting and might have nothing to do with windows anyway).

So I decide to use linux to setup the drupal sandbox, remembering that most of the web hosting is using linux as their hosting OS, I suppose that XAMPP on linux shouldn't have many problems.

Recently the linux Ubuntu is really popular and I will use it to setup the drupal sandbox.

Steps to setup the drupal sandbox on our desktop

  1. Download Ubuntu and It will be enough to use the ubuntu desktop i386 version, It is small and about 650M.
  2. Use CD burning software to burn the downloaded ISO image into an installable CD and just Install it, the whole process is really easy and worth not talking about.

  3. Now download XAMMP and it could be install with only one statement:

    sudo tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.7.xxx.tar.gz -C /opt

    After successful execution of the above statement, we get apache,php,mysql and we 're ready to install drupal now.

  4. before doing that, we should first modify the php.ini ( lampp/etc/php.ini), because the default setting of the memory is too small for drupal. we should modify it like this:

    memory_limit=128M

  5. Now we 're ready to start our xampp server like this:

    sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

  6. you could see the famous xampp screen now!

  7. Don't forget to Use phpadmin to create one mysql database that is used to store the drupal data.
  8. Now we could download drupal and unzip it under directory /opt/lampp/htdocs/drupal.
  9. Point your browser to http://localhost/drupal, and here comes the famous drupal installation screen!

Now just play with it as much as you could :)