Problems Installing Drupal 6.19 On GoDaddy

The other day I decided to install Drupal so I could see how it worked. I don’t have my own internet server and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of installing a local copy on my Windows Vista system using a Windows web server application like XAMPP or WAMP, so I decided to use one of my GoDaddy Linux hosting accounts instead

The installation procedure seemed simple enough, but I did run into a couple of snags that took a little of research and trial and error to solve.

When I went to the appropriate url to begin the actual Drupal setup on the GoDaddy server, I got a host error message instead of the Drupal installation script. Apparently, the GoDaddy install (https://hostingconnection.godaddy.com/Application/Drupal.aspx) did not load the /drupal/sites/default/default_settings.php file. I decided to download the Drupal files as though I was going to install the application on my desktop (http://drupal.org/project/drupal) so that I could try to manually copy the default_settings.php file to GoDaddy, but I didn’t realize that the GoDaddy install would not automatically grant me the permissions required to work with the /drupal/sites/default folder on the GoDaddy site.

After checking around for some online help for setting folder/file permissions in GoDaddy, I discovered that I had to go to the Control Center for my Linux hosting.  I tried adding full permissions but this was not allowed.  Finally, I decided to just add the Read and Execute permissions which then allowed me to add the write permission.  I was then able to copy the /drupal/sites/default/default_settings.php from my newly-downloaded Drupal files to the default folder in my GoDaddy database.

I still had one more task to perform before the installation script would run all the way through (this was not clear to me in the instructions).  Even though I found my GoDaddy MySQL user and database names (under products/hosting/databases/MySQL/Edit/View Details, it let me know that I had the right information, but it still didn’t work.  I finally discovered that I had to select the “Advanced” option ( http://drupal.org/documentation/install/run-script ) and change the host from “http://localhost” to the GoDaddy MySQL database path on the GoDaddy server.

Once I entered this information I was able to access the Drupal installation script on my site and I was able to continue.  After I completed this I removed the Write permission through the GoDaddy Control Center (see above).