I'm new
to Drupal and I recently installed Drupal to work with Postgres database. As
luck would have it, I hit a couple of configuration roadblocks along the way,
which I'd call the most painful and uninteresting part of my IT career. So
I thought I should summarize the steps in one place for future reference. I've
a Windows 7 X64 installed in my laptop.
The Downloads:
The
system requirements for Drupal are given here.
In short, download Apache, PHP (download
BOTH the installer and the zip version), Post
GRE SQL.
The Configuration:
The
step-by-step instruction to install Drupal is given here and it's fairly intuitive.
The Gotchas:
There
were a couple of things to watch out for:
1. PHP
looks for the config file (php.ini) in C:\Windows (or the equivalent windows
folder) by default and that file isn't automagically created. So we need to add
the PHP installation folder path to the PATH variable. In my case, I
added C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP to the PATH variable.
2. Drupal
uses PDO (PHP Data Objects) to connect to a database and you should be having a
PDO (which is usually a DLL) for each DB you intend to support. However, this
DLL is not provided in the PHP installer; and even if you go around hunting for
that DLL file in Google, you will hit nothing but road blocks. So after you
install PHP using the installer, unzip the contents of the PHP zip version that
you downloaded (to a different folder of course) and copy
the php_pdo_pgsql.dll file from the ext folder (under the extracted PHP
folder) to the actual ext folder (created by the windows installer). Then, the
php.ini file needs to be updated to include the following lines:
[PHP_PDO_PGSQL]
extension=php_pdo_pgsql.dll
