Note: This is an old article, and the APC Opcode Cache is now abandoned. Strongly consider installing Zend OPcache instead. APC is now effectively unsupported, although you can still install and use it. Furthermore, OPcache is included in the PHP core as of PHP 5.5, and OPcache is also available and fully supported for PHP […]
These are some notes on Drupal installation and performance on Unix-like operating systems (using Ubuntu here). Drupal Installation Install MySQL and create the database and Drupal database user first. If you must use apt or yum to install Drupal, don’t try to install everything at once. If you can avoid it, don’t install Drupal from […]
I was seeing a couple of errors in the Drupal Webform module, and this page describes the fixes I used to eliminate them. This applies to version 3.x so if you’ve upgraded to 4 I doubt this is relevant anymore. As described at http://drupal.org/node/1462986. To fix this I found #webform_component in the theme_webform_display_select() function in […]
Notes on Drupal development using Devel and some of its children. Install and Enable the Devel Module Devel can be downloaded from Drupal.org or by using the drush pm-download devel/drush pm-enable devel commands. Drupal Development with Devel Among other things, devel allows you to see inside the Drupal objects and arrays containing the different properties […]
This is quick overview of using Drush, or the Drupal shell, for updating and managing Drupal web sites. Attempting to administer Drupal through its GUI is a pain, but Drush allows you to run updates and alter your configuration quickly on the command line. Best of all, Drush is fully scriptable and provides its own […]
PHP Composer provides an easier way to install Drush than the method below. Instructions for this can be found in the Drush 8/Drupal 8 version of this article, available here. After installing Composer, run the command php composer.phar global require drush/drush:7.* to install Drush 7. Procedures for installing Drush on Linux-like machines. The easiest method […]
Note: The below instructions are for Varnish 3 on Ubuntu 12. If you want to run Drupal with Varnish 4 on Ubuntu 16, updated instructions are here. So, you want to set up Nginx and Drupal with all the bells and whistles on Ubuntu Server 12.04. You want caching for both PHP and Varnish and […]
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has been out for a while now, and it offers some nice enhancements over 12.04 in its default repos: Apache 2.4, PHP 5.5, and MySQL 5.5.3x. Starting from a bare server image, here’s how to get an Ubuntu 14 web server up and running for PHP. Install the Web Server Note: If […]
A quick summary of the major Linux/Unix Apache multi-processing modules. Prefork Default MPM in Apache < 2.4 Consumes more RAM than threaded MPMs like Worker or Event Threadless design is safe for non-thread-safe modules like mod_php Spawns child processes that each deal with one request at a time Performs poorly on high-traffic servers with many concurrent […]
I needed to increase the maximum length of the Drupal 7 file description field that appears when you enable the File module and allow uploads in nodes. By default, the file description field restricts input to 128 characters. The Drupal 7 File Description Field This is set in file.field.inc in the File module in core […]