Preparing Ubuntu Server for hosting Drupal sites

With the cheap prices of VPS hosting services these days, pretty much anyone can run his own server. Hosting your Drupal site on a VPS has a lot of advantages over running your site on shared hosting, but is a bit more difficult to get started. Using the following guide, you should be able to set up an Ubuntu Server on your VPS pretty easily. You'll install a full system with Apache, MySQL, SSH Server, PhpMyAdmin, ... We'll also configure the system with some minor tweaks that will cause a major performance boost over a barebones install.

Let's get started...

Installation guide

Let's kick off with updating all our Ubuntu packages to the latest versions available:

sudo apt-get update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
sudo aptitude full-upgrade

We'll now install the "essentials" metapackage. A nice package of some programs needed on most servers (like gcc, ...). We'll also install curl for running our Drupal cron scripts.

sudo aptitude install build-essential
sudo apt-get install curl

To run and manage Drupal sites, you need Apache, PHP and MySQL. Let's install those with some helper tools. For sending mails from Drupal, we'll install Postfix, a mail server. We'll also install phpMyAdmin. This will allow you to manage your MySQL databases from your browser. It will be accessible on http://your-server-ip/phpmyadmin.

sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-threaded-dev php5 php5-dev php-pear php5-gd mysql-server-5.0 phpmyadmin postfix

To enable clean urls in Drupal, we need to enable mod_rewrite.

sudo a2enmod rewrite

Let's also disable 2 Apache modules we won't use.

sudo a2dismod cgi
sudo a2dismod autoindex

To run Drupal a bit more comfortably you might want to increase some rather restrictive limits. We'll increase PHP's memory limit to 128Mb and allow upload and post sizes of 128Mb.

sudo sed -i 's/memory_limit = .*/memory_limit = 128M/' /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
sudo sed -i 's/upload_max_filesize = .*/upload_max_filesize = 128M/' /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
sudo sed -i 's/post_max_size = .*/post_max_size = 128M/' /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Drupal's FileField and Upload module can show a nice upload progress bar. To make this feature available, you need the uploadprogress extension. Let's enable it.

sudo pecl install uploadprogress
sudo sed -i '/; extension_dir directive above/ a\
extension=uploadprogress.so' /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Let's tell our server what time it is by setting up our timezone.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Let's finish by making our server a bit more secure. We'll prohibit root from login in over ssh. We'll also remove Apache's server signature you see under each page generated by Apache (like the directory pages, 404's, ...).

sudo sed -i 's/PermitRootLogin yes/PermitRootLogin no/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sudo sed -i 's/ServerSignature On/ServerSignature Off/' /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Drupal ships with a .htaccess file. To tell Apache to use this .htaccess file, we need to configure AllowOverride.

sudo sed -i 's/AllowOverride None/AllowOverride All/' /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

We now have all software packages installed and configured. We'll add a few performance enhancements and then restart our server to apply all our configuration changes.

Some performance tricks

One of the easiest methods to make your installation a lot faster is by enabling opcode caching like APC or eAccelerator. I prefer APC on Ubuntu. So let's enable it. Just hit enter to choose the defaults on all questions.

sudo pecl install apc
sudo sed -i '/; extension_dir directive above/ a\
extension=apc.so' /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Two client side performance tricks are enabling mod_deflate and mod_expires. mod_deflate will zip your CSS files etc. and save you some bandwith. mod_expires will make the caching on static files work.
We also need to configure mod_deflate to tell it it needs to compress javascript and css files. Drupal does not do this out of the box.

sudo a2enmod expires
sudo a2enmod deflate
sudo sed -i 's/DEFLATE text\/html text\/plain text\/xml/DEFLATE text\/html text\/plain text\/xml text\/css text\/javascript application\/x-javascript/' /etc/apache2/mods-available/deflate.conf

We also make our queries a bit more speedier by enabling query caching in MySQL.

sudo sed -i 's/query_cache_limit       = 1M/query_cache_limit       = 1M\
query_cache_type        = 1/' /etc/mysql/my.cnf

Restarting our services to apply our configuration changes

To finish our setup we apply all our modifications to the MySQL, PHP, Apache and SSH server configuration by restarting Apache, SSH server and MySQL server.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh force-reload
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql force-reload

Adding some management users

We'll now have a nice server for hosting our Drupal sites. But we might want to add some extra users so we don't have to run everything as root. The following will create an admin user with sudo rights. Use this user to do administrative tasks (updating your server, ...). We'll also add an "ftp" user. This user will own all the files in /var/www, which is where we host our site.

adduser admin
visudo 
add admin ALL=(ALL) ALL
adduser ftp
chgrp -R www-data /var/www
chown -R ftp /var/www
sudo chmod -R 2750 /var/www
# NOTE : "sudo chmod -R 2770" for files directories
sudo usermod -a -G www-data ftp

Uploading files

We have not installed an FTP server. I prefer using SSH/SFTP. To access your server with an (S)FTP client, specify port 22 instead of 21 when connecting. Always upload files to /var/www as the ftp user.

Caution

Although these instruction will give you a fully working server for running your Drupal websites, you should be cautious when you want to run a public server like a VPS or dedicated server. Your first step in adding more security might be configuring a firewall using iptables.

Ubuntu Server versions

I've tested this script on Ubuntu Server Hardy (8.04) but chances are it might work on 9.04 (and later) too.

Some VPS recommendations?

I'm running this site on VPS.NET now. I'm very pleased with the ease of setup, backups, features and price. But you might also want to check out some other services like SliceHost, Linode, ...

And if you want to spend a bit more bucks on superior quality and great support, you might want to choose the Belgian hosting service Priorweb.