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Drupal Clean URLs on Windows

Submitted by Kevin on Tue, 2009-07-28 21:26

This post is a follow-up to my previous blog entry Drupal Installation on Windows.

I am going to explain the steps to enable Clean URLs when using Drupal installed with Wampserver 2. I will assume that you followed the steps listed in the Drupal installation on Windows post and have Drupal running successfully with Wampserver. So let's get into it.

  1. The key to this process that is not obvious is that you have to modify the httpd.conf file that handles the configuration of Apache. In Wampserver that file is located at C:\wamp\bin\apache\Apache2.2.11\conf\httpd.conf. Your Apache version number in that path might be different from mine, but normally you will only have one Apache2.?? directory. When you have located the httpd.conf file open it with Wordpad.
  2. In the httpd.conf file search for "mod_rewrite". This will take you to a line of the file with "#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so". The pound sign (#) indicates that this line is deactivated so the rewrite module is not running. To activate the rewrite module simply remove the pound sign at the beginning of this line and save the httpd.conf file.
  3. Next you will need to restart Wampserver. You will see the Wampserver icon in the system tray. If you click on it, you will see the option to restart all services.
  4. Now you are ready to open your browser and navigate to your Drupal site that is running on localhost. Then you will go to Administer -> Site Configuration -> Clean URLs. On this page you should see that your server has been tested and Clean URLs can be enabled. Simply select the option for Enabled and Save.

Now Clean URLs will be working on your local Drupal installation.

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Clean URL's

Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 2009-07-29 08:19.

Oh yeah, that's what I meant to do. ;-) Thanks for the tip.

Now if you could cover importing a database created using a newer version of WAMPserver onto an older version I would appreciate it. It gave me fits last night. Ultimately SQL said it didn't see the database. I think I am going to scrub the whole thing and start all over.

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DB Import

Submitted by Kevin on Fri, 2009-07-31 07:01.

Maybe I will write a blog post about that at some point. Here is a quick explanation.

  1. Browse to http://localhost/phpmyadmin
  2. Create an empty database with the same name as before (assuming you want to restore your site on a clean installation)
  3. Click on the new database to make sure you are working on it (note your context is shown at the very top of the phpmyadmin page).
  4. Click on the Import tab
  5. Select your .sql file and click "Go".

Note this explanation is assuming that you used phpmyadmin to export a database prior to removing a different version of Wampserver.

A nice feature of the .sql file format is that it is a simple text file with a list of SQL statements. If you open the file and have a basic understanding of the SQL syntax, you can easily see what is going on. Also, the SQL statements used are not going to change with version changes of MySQL.

I haven't talked about MySQL users and Privileges, that is a topic for another time.

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