1. Download the latest version of Drupal from http://drupal.org/project/drupal. This can be done in two ways.

In the first method, download the Drupal archive via browser to your desktop PC and FTP the file from your local machine to your web hosting server via a FTP program such as FileZilla.

The second, if you have console access to the host server, use the 'wget' command with the fully qualified name of the download path/file. As of this writing the current stable version of Drupal was 6.14. Note: root access may be required to make changes on the file system such as creating files and removing directories. It is assumed that you have root (administrator) access via login or sudo command, or your login ID has full permissions to the /home/public_html

user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html$ 
               wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.14.tar.gz

2. The next step requires unpacking the compressed archive (tar.gz) file in the Webserver's public root directory with the 'tar' command. The string 'zxvf' following the 'tar' command are switches instructing the utility to unarchive the tar.gz file specified.

user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html$ tar zxvf drupal-6.14.tar.gz

The contents of the archive will be extracted and located at /home/public_html/drupal-6.14.

3. If Drupal will be handling all content management on the site it is recommended that you move the contents of the "drupal-6.14" directory into /home/public_html directory and remove the resulting empty directory. We will be using following commands: 'cd', 'mv', 'rmdir'.

Change directory to drupal-6.14.

user@getondrupal.com:/$ cd /home/public_html/drupal-6.14

Move contents of /home/public_html/drupal-6.14 to /home/public_html.

user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/drupal-6.14$ mv * /home/public_html

Move .htaccess file from /home/public_html/drupal-6.14 to /home/public_html. The previous command does not move .htaccess due to the period in front of the file name. Note: The file .htaccess is required for webservers such as Apache.

user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/drupal-6.14$ mv .htaccess /home/public_html

Change the directory to /home/public_html so that we can delete the empty drupal-6.14 directory.

user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/drupal-6.14$ cd..
user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html$ rmdir drupal-6.14

4. We want to make sure that the Webserver software has group permissions to all directories and files on /home/public_html with the 'chgrp' command and the recursive switch '-R'. Usually the group account is 'www-data' your settings may vary depending on the Linux Distribution or Webserver used.

user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html$ chgrp -R www-data /home/public_html

5. We are almost ready to initialize the install of Drupal. We'll need to copy a file ""default.settings.php"" to "settings.php", change its permissions temporarily, initialize Drupal via a browser, then change the permissions of "settings.php" back.

user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html$ cd ./sites/default
user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/sites/default$ cp default.settings.php settings.php
user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/sites/default$ chmod 777 settings.php

6. We are now ready to initialize Drupal via browser. If the Webserver is running on a local machine (ie. LAMP, WAMP) then point you browser to http://localhost, otherwise place your Webserver domain name or ip address in the address line of your browser. If everything was setup properly between Drupal, Apache and PHP the browser will load the following screen:

Select "Install Drupal in English" (unless you are creating a non-english website).
If step 5 was not followed properly you will get the the following error message:

If all prior steps were performed properly you will be prompted for database settings

Enter the database name and login information you setup in the previous lesson. Note: Only use the Advanced Options if you have the database server residing on a different host and/or port. If the database was set up properly Drupal will connect to the database and create the tables and data needed for functionality.

We need to reverse the permission change we made to the settings.php file in Step 5. In the console use the 'chmod' command to revert permissions.

user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/sites/default$ chmod 755 settings.php

Go back you your browser and configure the site with a Name, Admin Login, Time Zone and Clean URL options. Save and continue. Your Drupal site is now ready.

Click on the "your new site" link and you will be in the default page of your site. You'll need to create a new node/page and publish and promote it to the frontpage in order to remove the default page.