Installing Drupal in cPanel

In our cPanel tutorial series, we explain how to upload a website to your VPS. Before going through the steps below, we assume that you have gone through the tutorial series or are familiar with the subject matter and have created a database. 

In this article, we explain how to install Drupal on a cPanel VPS. Paid options such as Softaculous allow you to simplify and execute the installation from cPanel with one click.

We assume that you do not want to incur additional costs or install additional software, and only explain how to install Drupal in cPanel using the built-in options in cPanel itself.

Installing Drupal

Step 1

Download Drupal from the Drupal homepage and save the .zip file to your computer.

Step 2

Log in to cPanel as the user for which you want to install Drupal and click ‘File Manager'.

Step 3

You now see an overview of the folders and files. Click 'public_html'. Install your Joomla on a subdomain or add-on domain, then navigate to the relevant folder.

Step 4

Click 'Upload' at the top of the page. You will see the overview below.

Step 5

Click 'Select File' and select the file you downloaded in Step 1. Then click 'Open' to upload the file.

Step 6

Click 'Go Back to ...' at the bottom of the confirmation that appears.

Step 7

You will now return to the public_html folder and see 'drupal-8.4.5.zip' (or just the version that is current at the time of reading). Select the file and click 'Extract' at the top right.

Step 8

You will see the screen below in which you can adjust the unpacking location. Click 'Extract File(s)' to start the unpacking process.

Customizing the directory is an alternative method to install Drupal on your subdomain or add-on domain compared to step 3. You do this by referring to the directory of your subdomain or add-on domain here.

Step 9

Drupal will put its files in the 'drupal-4.8.5' folder in the .zip file you downloaded. As a result, a new folder is created in your public_html folder called "drupal-4.8.5". Click 'drupal-4.8.5' to open the folder.

Step 10

Click 'Select All' > 'Move'.

Step 11

You will see a 'Move' screen as below. Edit the location under 'Enter the path that you want to move this file to:' to '/public_html/' and click 'Move File (s)'.

All files are now in the right place. Remove the Drupal-4.8.5 folder and the .zip file by checking them and clicking 'Delete'.

Step 12 

Open yourdomain.com in a browser (replace yourdomain.com by your actual domain name). You will then see the Drupal setup menu. Select your preferred language and click 'Save and continue'.

Step 13 

You can then choose a 'Standard' or 'Minimal' installation. Choose 'Standard' and click 'Save and continue'.   

Step 14 

Drupal checks whether your VPS meets the requirements for the installation. You will see a warning about OPcache. Click 'continue anyway' at the bottom. You are free to enable OPcache after the installation, but the configuration of this is outside the scope of this article.   

Step 15 

Enter your database as shown in the example below and click 'Save and continue'.   

Step 16 

Drupal automatically installs your website and automatically follows the 'Set up translations' step.    

Step 17 

Drupal then asks you for the information below. Fill in the fields, write down your username and password in case you lose them, and click 'Save and continue'.   

Step 18 

Drupal updates the translation. After completing this process, you automatically go to your Drupal site and you can start setting up your site! 

We cannot offer support on the design and management of a Drupal website ourselves. You can contact Drupal support if necessary for example.

Should you have any questions left regarding this article, do not hesitate to contact our support department. You can reach them via the ‘Contact Us’ button at the bottom of this page.