Drupal Basics: Setting Up a Local Install of Drupal on a Mac

Whereas earlier version of open-source content-managment system Drupal may have been challenging to install, with the advent of  5.x, things have become much simpler.  Below, I'll describe how to set up a local install of Drupal 5.x on a Mac. The process is similar on other platforms, and can be used on the beta of Drupal version 6 as well.

The process outlined below is a great way for nonprofits to start playing with Drupal, as well as to review it for use as a Web-building tool. Drupal is free and requires no additional hardware.

1. Download a copy of MAMP (Mac Apache, MySQL, PHP). The Linux version is called LAMP, and the Windows version is called WAMP.
2. Download the version of Drupal you want to install from Drupal.org.
3. Extract the instance of Drupal you want to install.
4. Pop extracted directory into MAMP's htdocs folder, at /applications/MAMP/htdocs.
5. Fire up MAMP and click on "Open Start Page."
6. Click on phpMyAdmin in the menu bar at the top of the page.
7. Click on the "databases" link in the main body of the page.
8. At the bottom of this page, you'll find a text box that reads "Create new database." Type a name for your new database and choose a "collation" (I use latin1_swedish_ci.)
9. Create a user for the database. Click on the sql tab up top and use the following command "grant all on database_name accounts.* to user_name@localhost identified by "password" (sans quotes) and replacing "database_name" with the database, "user_name" with any name you care to put in, and "password" with any password you care to use.
10. In your browser, go to http://localhost:8888 and click twice on the directory with Drupal in it.
11. Enter the database name, database username, and database password in the appropriate fields. Leave the database type as mysql.
12. Click "Save configuration."

You now have a working instance of Drupal on your computer! Click on "your new site" and create user 1. Remember that to have your Drupal instance working, you have to start MAMP up before going to the local host Web address. You can load modules in and configure this just as you would a live site. It also give you an easy way to play with theming (i.e. how you make the site look and feel unique).