Drupal Installation on Windows

This post is to give a brief overview of the Drupal installation process on Windows. This setup works well as a test or development environment.

1. Install wamp server (from wampserver.com) Edit: The latest version of wampserver doesn't work with Drupal. See the note at the end of this post.
2. Download Drupal. You can use either Drupal core from Drupal.org or Acquia Drupal from acquia.com.
3. Extract the compressed file to the www directory. By default this is located C:\wamp\www. If the file you downloaded has the extension .tar.gz you will need to install 7-zip (www.7-zip.org). For now just extract the file into the www directory then rename the new directory to simply Drupal.
4. Next you will need to create a new database for your Drupal install. To do that first make sure you have wamp running (using the tool in the system tray) then navigate to localhost/phpmyadmin in your browser. This will show you a web interface for managing your local MySQL installation. Right on the main page you will see an option to create a database. Enter a database name then change the collation to utf8_general and click on Create.
5. Since this is probably a fresh installation of MySQL, you will also need to create a database user. The username and password will be only used by your Drupal installation to read and write to the database. You will need to go to the Privileges tab and create a new user. After your user is created, click on the Privileges tab again and then you should see your new username. You will then edit the user to give the account full access to the new database you just created.
6. Now you are ready to install Drupal. In your browser navigate to localhost/drupal. Then you should see the Drupal installation screen. The steps are mostly self explanatory. You will need to dig into the Drupal installation a little to create the settings.php file. To do that go to C:\wamp\www\drupal\sites\default\. There you will see a default.settings.php. Copy that file and rename it to settings.php. Then you can continue the process in your browser and Drupal will automatically modify the file to include your database settings.

That is the basic process of installing Drupal on a Windows computer. After you complete this you should have a working Drupal installation. Some slightly more advanced features won't be working (like clean urls, sending email...). Those items can be explained in a later post.

Feel free to post any questions that come up or hurdles you encounter.

Note: The current version of wampserver includes PHP 5.3. Unfortunately, Drupal uses some functions that have been deprecated in PHP 5.3. The easiest way to work around this is to install Wampserver 2.0h. The installer can be found by going to http://sourceforge.net/projects/wampserver/files/, expanding the WampServer 2 heading and selecting the WampServer2.0h.exe file.