How to Install Drupal CMS with Let’s Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 22.04

Drupal is a free open source system and one of the most popular CMS platforms in the world. It is written in PHP and uses MariaDB as its database backend. It is used for creating various types of websites and blogs. It is a simple, modular and highly customizable CMS and an alternative CMS solution for other popular CMSs like WordPress or Drupal. Drupal has a user-friendly web interface that allows website creators to add, edit, publish or remove content through the web browser.

In this post, we will show you how to install Drupal CMS with Apache and Let’s Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 22.04.

Requirements

A server running Ubuntu 22.04.
A valid domain name pointing to your server’s IP.
A root password configured on the server.

Install LAMP server

First you need to install Apache web server, MariaDB database server, PHP and other required PHP extensions on your server. You can install them all with the following command:

apt-get install apache2 mariadb-server php libapache2-mod-php php-cli php-fpm php-json php-common php-mysql php-zip php-gd php-intl php-mbstring php-curl php-xml php-pear php-tidy php-soap php-bcmath php-xmlrpc -y

Once all packages are installed, edit the PHP configuration file and change some default values:

nano /etc/php/8.1/apache2/php.ini

Change the following lines:

memory_limit = 256M
date.timezone = UTC

Save and close the file and restart the Apache service to apply the changes:

systemctl restart apache2

Create a database for Drupal

Next, you need to create a database and a user for Drupal. First, log in to MariaDB with the following command:

mysql

Once logged in, create a database and user with the following command:

CREATE DATABASE drupal;
CREATE USER 'drupaluser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Next, grant the Drupal database all permissions with the following command:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON drupal.* to drupaluser@'localhost';

Clear the permissions and exit the MariaDB shell with the following command:

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

Download Drupal CMS

Go to the Drupal download page and download the latest version of Drupal with the following command:

wget https://www.drupal.org/download-latest/tar.gz -O drupal.tar.gz

Once the download is complete, extract the downloaded file using the following command:

tar xvf drupal.tar.gz

Move the extracted directory to the Apache web root using the following command:

mv drupal-9.3.13 /var/www/html/drupal

Next, change the ownership and access rights for the Drupal directory:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/drupal
chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/drupal

When you are done with this, you can proceed to the next step.

Configure Apache for Drupal

Next, create a configuration file for the Apache virtual host for Drupal using the following command:

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/drupal.conf

Add the following configuration:

     ServerName drupal.example.com
     ServerAdmin [email protected]
     DocumentRoot /var/www/html/drupal/

     CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
     ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log

      
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride All
            Require all granted
            RewriteEngine on
            RewriteBase /
            RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
            RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
            RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

Save and close the file and enable the required Apache modules with the following command:

a2dismod mpm_event
a2enmod mpm_prefork
a2enmod rewrite

Next, activate the configuration file for the Drupal virtual host with the following command.

a2ensite drupal.conf

Then restart the Apache service to apply the changes.

systemctl restart apache2

Then check the status of the Apache service with the following command:

systemctl status apache2

You should see the following output:

? apache2.service - The Apache HTTP Server
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/apache2.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Thu 2022-05-12 16:36:29 UTC; 5s ago
       Docs: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/
    Process: 27121 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/apachectl start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 27125 (apache2)
      Tasks: 6 (limit: 2292)
     Memory: 14.4M
        CPU: 96ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/apache2.service
             ??27125 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
             ??27126 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
             ??27127 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
             ??27128 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
             ??27129 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
             ??27130 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

May 12 16:36:29 ubuntu systemd[1]: Starting The Apache HTTP Server...

Accessing the Drupal web interface.

Now open your web browser and access the Drupal web interface using the URL http://drupal.example.com. You should see the language selection screen: