Install Drupal with Nginx and Ubuntu 18.04 on Google Cloud
Our previous tutorial showed you how to run Drupal CMS and Apache2 with Ubuntu on Google Cloud.. This post shows you how to run Drupal with Nginx and Ubuntu via Google’s Cloud VM…
Google Compute Engine (GCE) allows you to create customized VMs with your choice of operating systems… The VMs are created in Google Cloud in various regions of the world..
If you need a fast, powerful server to run your applications, you may want to consider Google Cloud VMs… and this tutorial is going to show you how to set it up…
Using GCE, you can create custom VMs with complete control over the VMs’ environment and runtime as you write or install programs — and they come with persistent disk storage, great performance and are adaptable…
This brief tutorial will show students and new user a step by step guide on how to setup Drupal websites on Ubuntu 16.04 | 18.04 using Google Compute Engine to help improve their website performance and protect their sites against malicious actors..
This tutorial will take the complexity of out running your website on GCE cloud…
This setup might take a while to complete and the process below should work on other websites as well… It doesn’t have to be Drupal… This setup should work on other CMSs and plain HTML sites out of the box…When you’re ready to setup Drupal on Ubuntu using GCE, follow the steps below:
Step 1: Sign up for Google Cloud Platform
The first step in this tutorial is to sign up for Google Cloud Platform (GCP)… This assumes that you already have registered a domain name.. If you don’t, then go and get one before continuing further…
Once you have a domain name, click on the link below to sign up for GCP account…
After logging to your GCP account, there are things things to do right away…
- Setup your billing account
- Setup your project
- Enable GCE API and configure Services Quotas
To enable the items above, navigate to the top left hamburger menu, then go Billing and setup your billing account.. You’ll have to enter your credit or checking account info in the payment method section…
Once your payment method is validated, continue to the next page..
After setting up your billing account, go and enable Google Compute API & Services…
Click on the hamburger menu again and go to APIs & Services ==> Library
There, enable Compute Engine API… then click Manage to go to the Quota page…
On the Quotas page, enable the required quotas… To save time for this tutorial, I chose ( 2,000 requests per second ) for many of these queries….
More services and queries to configure…
When you done with configuring your default quotas… It may take a few minutes to an hour for Google to approve your settings… Once your account and settings are approved… you should have access to GCE…
Your dashboard should look similar to the one below when you log back in…
Step 2: Create GCE Instance with Ubuntu Image
Now that your GCE APIs and services are approved… navigate to the hamburger menu on the top left and scroll to Compute Engine ==> VM Instances…
There, click the CREATE INSTANCE button to begin the creation process…
On the template page… choose a name for the VM, then for the boot disk, click the Change button to select Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04 Image… By default, Debian image is chosen when you create a new instance…
Also make sure both HTTP and HTTPS traffic are allowed… when you’re done, click Create
That should create a new VM with Ubuntu image on it and start the machine up…
To connect to Ubuntu OS, click SSH as shown in the image below… or (Open in browser window)…
That should launch the browser SSH connection to the newly created VM with Ubuntu logon message… From here you can begin configuring your Ubuntu VM…
If you’re going to be hosting a website or need a static IP address for the VM, you’ll have to create a new static IP request and reserve… To do that, click the VM name to go into its settings page…
Then click Edit
Scroll down to Internal IP type and select Create IP address
There, choose a new for the IP address and click RESERVE
A new public IP address will be created and attached to the VM… This will be the static IP for the VM you just created… Now go to the domain provider and update the hostname to point to this public IP address for the VM to access it….
This setup assumes that your domain name is called example.com and is pointing to your server with IP address 192.168.1.2
Don’t forget to also make sure www CNAME is pointing to the domain name…. Should look like something below:
example.com A ==========> 192.168.1.2 www CNAME ==========> example.com
You have now created a new VM with Ubuntu image on Google Compute Engine
Step 3: Install and Configure Drupal
Now that GCE is configure, logon to your server and configure Drupal… First install Nginx HTTP server since we’re using Nginx for this post.. To install Nginx server, run the commands below:
sudo apt update sudo apt install nginx
After installing Nginx, the commands below can be used to stop, start and enable Nginx service to always start up with the server boots…
sudo systemctl stop nginx.service sudo systemctl start nginx.service sudo systemctl enable nginx.service
Now that Nginx is installed…. to test whether the web server is working, open your browser and browse to the URL below…
If you see the page above, then Nginx is successfully installed…
Step 4: Install MariaDB Database Server
Drupal also requires a database server to store its content… If you’re looking for a truly open source database server, then MariaDB is a great place to start… To install MariaDB run the commands below:
sudo apt-get install mariadb-server mariadb-client
After installing MariaDB, the commands below can be used to stop, start and enable MariaDB service to always start up when the server boots…
Run these on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
sudo systemctl stop mysql.service sudo systemctl start mysql.service sudo systemctl enable mysql.service
Run these on Ubuntu 19.04 and 18.04 LTS
sudo systemctl stop mariadb.service sudo systemctl start mariadb.service sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service
Next, run the commands below to secure the database server with a root password if you were not prompted to do so during the installation…
sudo mysql_secure_installation
When prompted, answer the questions below by following the guide.
- Enter current password for root (enter for none): Just press the Enter
- Set root password? [Y/n]: Y
- New password: Enter password
- Re-enter new password: Repeat password
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n]: Y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n]: Y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n]: Y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n]: Y
Now that MariaDB is installed, to test whether the database server was successfully installed, run the commands below…
sudo mysql -u root -p
type the root password when prompted…
If you see a similar screen as shown above, then the server was successfully installed…
Step 5: Install PHP 7.2-FPM and Related Modules
Drupal CMS is a PHP based CMS and PHP is required… However, PHP 7.2-FPM may not be available in Ubuntu default repositories… To run PHP 7.2-FPM on Ubuntu 16.04 and previous, you may need to run the commands below:
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
Then update and upgrade to PHP 7.2-FPM
sudo apt update
Next, run the commands below to install PHP 7.2-FPM and related modules.
sudo apt install php7.2-fpm php7.2-common php7.2-mysql php7.2-gmp php7.2-curl php7.2-intl php7.2-mbstring php7.2-xmlrpc php7.2-gd php7.2-xml php7.2-cli php7.2-zip
After installing PHP 7.2-FPM, run the commands below to open PHP default configuration file for Nginx…
sudo nano /etc/php/7.2/fpm/php.ini
The lines below is a good settings for most PHP based CMS… Update the configuration file with these and save….
file_uploads = On allow_url_fopen = On short_open_tag = On memory_limit = 256M cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0 upload_max_filesize = 100M max_execution_time = 360 date.timezone = America/Chicago
Everytime you make changes to PHP configuration file, you should also restart Nginx web server… To do so, run the commands below:
sudo systemctl restart nginx.service
Now that PHP is installed, to test whether it’s functioning, create a test file called phpinfo.php in Nginx default root directory…. ( /var/www/html/)
sudo nano /var/www/html/phpinfo.php
Then type the content below and save the file.
<?php phpinfo( ); ?>
Next, open your browser and browse to the server’s hostname or IP address followed by phpinfo.php
You should see PHP default test page…
Step 6: Create Drupal Database
Now that you’ve installed all the packages that are required for Drupal to function, continue below to start configuring the servers. First run the commands below to create a blank Drupal database.
To logon to MariaDB database server, run the commands below.
sudo mysql -u root -p
Then create a database called drupal
CREATE DATABASE drupal;
Create a database user called drupaluser with a new password
CREATE USER 'drupaluser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'new_password_here';
Then grant the user full access to the database.
GRANT ALL ON drupal.* TO 'drupaluser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'user_password_here' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Finally, save your changes and exit.
FLUSH PRIVILEGES; EXIT;
Step 7: Download Drupal Latest Release
To get Drupal latest release you may want to use Github repository… Install Composer, Curl and other dependencies to get started…
sudo apt install curl git curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | sudo php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
After installing curl and Composer above, change into the Nginx root directory and download Drupal packages from Github… Always replace the branch number with the latest branch….
cd /var/www/html
sudo git clone --branch 8.6.0 https://git.drupal.org/project/drupal.git
cd /var/www/html/drupal
sudo composer install
Then run the commands below to set the correct permissions for Drupal to function.
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/drupal/ sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/drupal/
Step 8: Configure Nginx
Finally, configure Nginx site configuration file for Drupal. This file will control how users access Drupal content. Run the commands below to create a new configuration file called drupal
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/drupal
Then copy and paste the content below into the file and save it. Replace the highlighted line with your own domain name and directory root location.
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
root /var/www/html/drupal;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
location / {
try_files $uri /index.php?$query_string;
}
location @rewrite {
rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1;
}
location ~ [^/]\.php(/|$) {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
location ~ ^/sites/.*/files/styles/ {
try_files $uri @rewrite;
}
location ~ ^(/[a-z\-]+)?/system/files/ {
try_files $uri /index.php?$query_string;
}
}
Save the file and exit.
Step 9: Enable the Drupal
After configuring the VirtualHost above, enable it by running the commands below
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/drupal /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ sudo systemctl restart nginx.service
Then open your browser and browse to the server domain name. You should see Drupal setup wizard to complete. Please follow the wizard carefully.
Then follow the on-screen instructions and select the installation language here…
Next, select the installation profile and continue
On the next screen, enter the database connection info you created above and continue…
Then create an admin account and the Drupal site info and finish the instalation…. after a brief moment, you should see your new site created…
Congratulation! You have successfully installed Drupal on Ubuntu 16.04 | 18.04 and may work on upcoming 18.10…
In the future when you want to upgrade to a new released version, simply run the commands below to upgrade…
sudo composer update /var/www/htmnl/drupal/core --with-dependencies cd /var/www/html/drupal sudo composer require drush/drush cd /var/www/html/drupal/vendor/drush/drush ./drush updatedb ./drush cr
That’s it!
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i follow your tutorial, but i stuck at Step 8: Configure Nginx, pindurian.com’s server IP address could not be found. u have any idea to help me