We all know you can run several Drupal sites using a single codebase. This is done using Drupal's multisite feature. Most of the time you want to host all sites on a different domain name. There's a lot of documentation on how this can be accomplished.
But sometimes you want to run the sites in a subdirectory on one domain. You may want to do this to run a development server for a multisite. You can host all sites in a subdirectory then. This can be easily done with some extra Apache configuration.
Suppose your domain name is mydrupalsite.com. You want to host a bunch of site using Drupal's multisite feature in the subdirectories
http://www.mydrupalsite.com/subdir2
http://www.mydrupalsite.com/subdir3
You have to do 3 things.
Add alias your Apache configuration file
We want requests for the 3 subdirectories to go to the same Drupal instance. We can do this using Apache's Alias functionality.
Alias /subdir2 /var/www
Alias /subdir3 /var/www
I'm supposing here Drupal's codebase is hosted in /var/www on your machine.
Redirecting all requests to index.php
Now that we're serving all requests from one codebase we have to redirect all requests to index.php. This needs to be done since all Drupal requests are served from one endpoint, called index.php.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/subdir1/(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /subdir1/index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/subdir2/(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /subdir2/index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/subdir3/(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /subdir3/index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
Creating our settings.php
You can now have different settings (database, ...) for each site by creating a different settings file for each site. Place the settings.php for each file under a directory called after the domain name and subdirectory. In our example we would have the following setting files:
/var/www/sites/mydrupalsite.com.subdir2/settings.php
/var/www/sites/mydrupalsite.com.subdir3/settings.php
Comments
drupal rules!
drupal rules!
how to share session in multiple website
I create multiple website follow your steps, but how to sharing the session on this multiple website, let user can access all multiple website.
thank you
the .htaccess piece was what I was missing to get clean urls working. made my day, thanks!
How can I do in Window WAMP
How can I do in Window WAMP server?
http://localhost/site1
http://localhost/site2
symbolic link
can anyone tell me how can i create symbolic link on my server not my host using php script.
Custom Website Development
Really intresting and helpful post.Thanks for sharing information.
Reply to Azuledu
Are you sure that the clean url will work for both www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com/subdir1?
Simpler
I had problems with alias. I get it working in a simpler way:
My drupal is under /var/www/drupal and I want 2 diferent sites at myserver.com/site1 and myserver.com/site2
I only need 2 simple steps:
1.-Create var/www/drupal/sites/myserver.com.site1, copy settings.php inside and setup database conection string at settings.php
2.-Create simbolic links at /var/www
sudo ln -s /var/www/drupal /var/www/site1
sudo ln -s /var/www/drupal /var/www/site2
And nothing else. It works perfectly.
Update to my own post and
Update to my own post and apologize to the original author Davy Van Den Bremt. You method works partially. I can now have both my main drupal and sub-folder drupal work following your method. However, the clean urls function does not work on the subfolder. I can select "enable" under Administer/Site configuration/Clean URLs in my sub-folder installation. But after I clicked "Save configuration", it brings me to the login page of my main drupal installation, and says "Access denied. You are not authorized to access this page.". The URL showed in browser was still /subdir1/admin/settings/clean-urls.
The trick is RewriteRule and RewriteBase. In fact, in my case, I found that your Rewrite script did not affect anything. I copied yours in .htaccess of my main drupal installation. The original rewrite script in .htaccess file works fine. I changed the RewriteBase from / to /subdir1, it worked. But, do the reversed thing as I described above. e.g. when set to use clean urls in main drupal. it brings me to the log in page of my sub-folder installation.
My test indicates that your
My test indicates that your way does not work.
It can find index.php file, but I always get a "page not fond" error when I visit
The only way that I found works is create a symlink back to the home directory where drupal is installed, as Boris Mann suggested.
Drupal in subdirectory and multi site in subdirectory
I have drupal installed at sub directory http://www.m4manas.com/6 I am able to access the site.
Now, i want to have multi site facility in this setup using same code base. I have installed a test site in sites/test
and modified following
1. .htacess to tell that drupal base is /6\
2. Update .htacess with the code
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/test/(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /test/index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
3. $base in settings at sites/test to show that the base is /6
4. Create a symlink pointing to base path
I am getting page not found error please help.
simpler .htaccess
in htaccess:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(\w+)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /%1/index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
This will work so long as each subdirectory contains only alphanumeric characters. (another regex might be more versatile, but it must stop at the first slash.)
With this you don't have to edit your .htaccess every time you add a site.
mollom installed
I have, but sometimes it lets something slip through.
mollom to avoid spam
You may want to install the free mollom version to avoid comment spam like the one above.
Some updates
You don't need to alias or change rewrites, you can just create a symlink in /var/www. So, ln -s /var/www /var/www/subdir1.
As well, in sites, the dot is the correct separator for subfolders -- sites/mydrupalsite.com.subdir1
I updated the multisite documentation to make this clearer: http://drupal.org/getting-started/6/install/multi-site
That page could use further editing. Please add your edits!
Another way
There perhaps is another way to do this that is simpler: no need to change Apache settings or Drupal rewrite code. First, install Drupal under the web root directory (e.g., drupal_site). Then, create site-specific folders in the following format:
cp -R drupal_site/sites/default/ drupal_site/sites/mysite.com.drupal_2
Give each site-specific folder its own settings.php and database. Finally, make symbolic links from the web root directory to the site-specific folders, where the symbolic links are given your desired subdirectory names:
ln -s drupal_2 drupal_site
Now you can browse to mysite.com/drupal_1 and mysite.com/drupal_2 and get different sites. There are probably limitations to this approach, but it worked for me. One limitation may be that some platforms don't support symbolic links (e.g., Windows -- I don't know if shortcuts would be interpreted similarly by the web server.)
Redirecting all requests to
Redirecting all requests to index.php
Are you doing this in the .htaccess in the Drupal root?
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