A brief trip to server land

June 6, 2010

Update: As of August 2017, this site is no longer managed with Drupal. It is instead a static HTML/CSS site updated by hand. The reasons for this are explained in About this site. Drupal is still a very cool tool, just overkill for my present purposes.

My site was up and running as soon as I used the one-click Drupal installer at bluehost. But I couldn't stop myself from "opening the hood" and poking around to see how it was done.

So I had the provider enable SSH access to the host server, and logged in. I had several things I wanted to accomplish:

• To reassure myself that this was a familiar, Unix-based environment. It was.
• To make sure I could dump the MySQL database and reload it elsewhere if necessary. I could. At least after I spent a day or so figuring out that the Drupal installation had enabled the $db_prefix setting and applied a prefix to all of Drupal's database tables.
• To make sure I could install Drupal modules and updates. I could. One day after I started the site with drupal-6.16, drupal-6.17 was released. I updated it manually. It turned out I could have used a one-click Drupal updated on the host, but I felt more comfortable knowing exactly what was happening.
• I wanted to push the Drupal install down one level in the directory structure so I could serve media files independently of Drupal. In a more typical Drupal install, where you had many people maintaining the content, you might want to stick with Drupal's core Upload module. But since I'm the only content maintainer, and since I have SSH access, I find it more efficient to do bulk uploads of media content via SFTP. To move the Drupal install, I had to tweak the Apache .htaccess at the document root. Contact me if you want details.

Painful though it was, I'm glad I figured out how all these pieces fit together. Now I'm confident I can recover the site content and fix any problems that might arise.