Drupal

Apticron is a handy little application that uses cron to check for updates to your Ubuntu Server install on a daily basis. It will check in with the Ubuntu mothership and send you email if any new updates are available, which is important for avoiding known security vulnerabilities.

Install apticron: to send a daily email alert if there are available updates for your system:

sudo apt-get -y install apticron

Configure apticron to check for updates daily and send email if any new updates are available:

The following outlines the post installation tasks that you should perform to configure your server for basic operation, such as network interface and firewall configuration, server localization, time synchronization, timezone configuration, etc.

PHP is the scripting language upon which Drupal is built. Drupal 7 requires PHP version 5.2 or greater, however these instructions will install PHP version 5.3. Note that, as of this writing, many Drupal modules have not been upgraded to work with version 5.3. It may be necessary to back-grade to version 5.2.

MySQL is the recommended database for Drupal, and Drupal 7 requires version 5.0.15 or higher. The following will walk you through installing MySQL server on Ubuntu Server and creating a database for your first Drupal site. More details are available in the MySQL section of the Ubuntu Server Guide.

Drupal will run on a number of operating systems, however it is typically installed on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). When choosing an OS for Drupal, it is important to clearly identify your requirements. The following are the operating system selection criteria we used for the purpose of this cookbook:

Originally developed by Sun, Oracle VirtualBox is an open source virtualization product for x86 and AMD64/Intel64 hardware. VirtualBox currently runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris host operating systems. Because it is free, open source and stable, VirtualBox is a viable choice for desktop development environments or low cost enterprise server implementations.

There are a number of platform options for hosting Drupal. Your choice will likely be determined primarily by your current datacenter environment and available skill sets. Drupal runs happily on shared hosting, virtual private servers, dedicated servers and cloud server environments. As with any service, the platform you choose will also be informed by performance and availability requirements.

Postfix is a mail transfer agent that enables sending email from Drupal. This is required, for example, to enable Drupal-based contact forms and user registration confirmation messages. We will assume that you have already correctly configured MX records in DNS.  The following instructions cover the minimum required to send email from Drupal.

In this tutorial, we will install and configure the Apache http server on Ubuntu Server for both http (port 80) and https (ssl over port 443). While Drupal will run on a number of web servers, Apache is by far the most commonly used for both development and production. For more details, check out the Apache2 Web Server section of the Ubuntu Server Guide.

Install apache2: