Drupal Tutorials

Drupal Sub domain configuration

Prerequisites
You should be comfortable with server configurations and will to get your hands dirty (a bit).

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Comments (37)

Drupal 4.6, Drupal 4.7, Drupal 5, Drupal 6, Intermediate, General, server, subdomains

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Saturday, February 21, 2009

By ariene

Big thanks to Ariene Ellefsen for writing this great little tutorial for DrupalSN, thanks Ariene!

Hello Everybody,

I’d like to share this tutorial with you about how to set up subdomains on your website using Drupal and a few server tricks.

So why use subdomains?

Subdomains offer 3 main advantages:

Google treats a sub domain as a totally different website from its main domain

You can use any keyword(s) as a subdomain

It doesn’t cost you any extra money to set up a subdomain (with most host companies).

So, if your agent website is hosted on a domain name like, “ellewebdesign.com“, you can set up an unlimited number of subdomains (providing you host company permits it, check with them), such as…

service.ellewebdesign.com
portfolio.ellewebdesign.com
blog.ellewebdesign.com
project.ellewebdesign.com

And so on. The good news is that the keywords in the subdomain name carry SEO importance, just like the keywords in the domain name. Combine that with the fact that Google sees each subdomain as a separate website, you’ve got a great way to create lots of backlinks.

Here’s another Google advantage. As it is now, each search results page on Google will show a maximum of two listings from the same website. But if you set up subdomains, it’s possible to dominate all 10 listings on the first results page of Google!

So subdomains can offer big SEO (Search Engine Optimization) advantages as well as looking professional.

We have all heard by now the advantages of having a blog for promoting your website. So why not try it and create a blog using this technique and subdomains for your site!

Once you have your blog, adding a link to it on your menu takes a couple of seconds, and voila – your blog is up and running. This is the part where you feverishly start posting articles about your niche market, your product, or your service, and link to your website from each article.

Blogs are amazing: Search Engines love them, and they generally get good PR very quickly.

Good luck and I hope this tutorial will show you the importance of using subdomains.

Subdomain Setup

Let’s get stuck in and set up our subdomains.

If you want to test this you can download XAMPP or WAMP and have your local computer run like a server. Both packages are free and easy to set up.
For these examples we are using XAMPP for Windows.

It’s highly recommended that you test this locally before working on a live server and we recommend checking with your host before setting up subdomains as some hosts will offer a control panel to set up subdomains quickly and easily.

Step 1: Server Setup

1 First let’s create a DNS entries file for the website (The purpose of creating the DNS entry is to be able to test the sub domains in our local machine)

DSN (Domain Name System) tells your server where a subdomain or web address should be directed to. It’s basically a way of putting a human readable name over the top of an IP address.

2 To find the host file (that we can add our DSN entries to) go to: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\ then open the “hosts” file using Notepad.

Add the following entries, then save and close the “hosts” file:

3 Next we need to alter our Apache VirtualHost settings to look for the new subdomains.

Locate your servers httpd.conf or httpd-vhosts.conf file (which one you have depends on your server setup), if you are using XAMPP you’ll find it at:

c:\program files\xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf

On Linux you will find your httpd.conf file at:

/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

So go ahead and add the following to the bottom of your httpd.conf or httpd-vhosts.conf file:

Listen 80 <VirtualHost *:80> DocumentRoot "C:/Program Files/xampp/htdocs" ServerName localhost:80 </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost www.site.local:80> DocumentRoot "C:/Program Files/xampp/htdocs" ServerName www.site.local:80 </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost www.blog.site.local:80> DocumentRoot "C:/Program Files/xampp/htdocs" ServerName www.blog.site.local:80 </VirtualHost>

You’ll need to restart Apache to this change to take affect.
On Linux use: apachectl -k restart
On XAMPP you can use the XAMPP control panel or restart your computer.

Great!! We already have two subdomains but to make it works we need to create a folder inside of our apache installation.

Step 2: Drupal “sites” folder setup

1 Go to: C:\Program Files\xampp\htdocs and create a folder called “www.site.local”, this is where your default Drupal installation will reside so add all your Drupal installation files to this folder.

Proceed with the Drupal installation and test the site on your local machine.

Step 3: Let’s create our subdomain

We going to create a “blog” subdomain (blog.site.local) for our main Drupal install (www.site.local).

1 Let’s add the new subdomain folder inside of C:/Program Files/xampp/htdocs/www.site.local/sites and call it “blog.site.local” (see screengrab below).

The new “blog.site.local” folder will contain all the settings, themes and modules that are specific to the new subdomain, any modules or themes common to all sites should go in you sites/all folder.
Find out more about installing modules and themes.

2 Now we need to create a new settings.php file for Drupal to recognize that the blog.site.local is a subdomain of the main www.site.local domain.

To do this follow the following steps:
A) Copy the settings.php file from www.site.local/sites/default to the folder blog.site.local

B) Now we need to decide if we want our subdomains to share the same database or to have a different database for each subdomains (a Drupal multisite setup).
I will explain how to set up both. Let’s start with a single database for each subdomain:

Single Database Set up
1 Open the settings.php in our new “blog.site.local” folder and modify the $db_url and $db_prefix to reflect our database settings.
Let’s replaced the line below with our database, username and password:

<?php
//$db_url = 'mysql://username:password@localhost/databasename';
$db_url = 'mysql://drupal:drupal@localhost/drupal_db';
?>

2 Now we need to alter the $db_prefix variable so that all our database tables for this subdomain are preffixed with some text so we can distinguish between them and the main domain tables.

You can choose any prefix you want for your $db_prefix configuration, I’ll use ‘blog1_’:

<?php
 $db_prefix = 'blog1_'; 
?>

And that is it!! Here you have a drupal site with subdomains using a single database!!!

Now just point your site to: www.blog.site.local and proceed with your installation. Each subdomain will have our own database.

Set up Multiple databases
Follow the exactly the same proceedure as with the sinle database set up but make sure you leave the $db_prefix blank:

<?php
 $db_prefix = ''; 
?>

And that is it!! Here you have a drupal site with subdomains using a multiple database!!!

Now just point your site to: www.blog.site.local and proceed with your installation. Your subdomain will share the same database.

I hope this tutorial is helpful!!! Thank you for reading!!

Ariene Ellefsen
http://www.ellewebdesign.com

Some really great SEO tips

By Imafilmmaker on Monday, May 11, 2009

Some really great SEO tips about subdomains! Many people overlook the importance of using keywords in the URL. Thanks so much for this tutorial. Do you know how to do this using MAMP on OSX? I’m not sure I understand how to access the DNS on a mac.

I use this to manage my

By erclerico on Wednesday, May 20, 2009

I use this to manage my local hosts on my Mac – very handy for off-line development: http://www.northernsoftworks.com/hostal.html

Your exactly right Ima, it's

By merchantvice on Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Your exactly right Ima, it’s also important that you to make the url keyword rich also like example putting the keyword lets say pool cleaners you can insert this keyword like this www.domain.com/poolcleaners or www.domain.com/pool-cleaners but for me this is more effective; www.domain.com/pool_cleaners
:)

Really a fantastic tutorial

By nazar2k2 on Friday, September 18, 2009

Really a fantastic tutorial for creating the sub domains.thanks for this great tutorial.Also can you please tell me how to do this using Lamp on OS?

Thanks

http://www.drupal-web-developers.com

Thank you for this great

By Program on Friday, November 20, 2009

Thank you for this great info, I was struggling to write a subdomains for very long, eventually i got idea here.
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Superb tutorial and you are

By richardb on Monday, May 10, 2010

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This is a great tutorial. I

By JulesDM on Sunday, December 6, 2009

This is a great tutorial. I was having some issues with this when setting up a subdomain. It turns out the issue was with my GoDaddy account. I finally got my subdomain resolved, but this tutorial is still helpful nonetheless.

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Great!! We already have two

By deff_lepp on Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Great!! We already have two subdomains but to make it works we need to create a folder inside of our apache installation.
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I was having some issues with this when setting up a subdomain. Now it is resolved. Thanks!
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Place a new

By rishi on Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Place a new yoursubdomain.youdomain.com directory in the sites/ directory. This contains a settings.php file configured for this site, and optionally custom themes and modules for the subdmain site.
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We can assign our subdomains to share the same database or to have a different database for each subdomains a drupal multisite setup.
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You can read more on it here. http://drupal.org/node/43816

I did this the same way you do any multisite configuration. That is
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B) place a new yoursubdomain.youdomain.com directory in the sites/ directory. This contains a settings.php file configured for this site, and optionally custom themes and modules for the subdmain site.

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Drupal Sub domain configuration

So why use subdomains?

Subdomain Setup

Step 1: Server Setup

Step 2: Drupal “sites” folder setup

Step 3: Let’s create our subdomain

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