I have a fairly reasonable “WIMP” stack (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP) running on my work machine now, and I wanted to document how I got there, for future reference, or for anyone who might stumble across this blog post. My setup has evolved over time, so I’m not 100% sure if these instructions would work exactly right from scratch.
There are some ways to get a Drupal-compatible “WAMP” stack (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) running on Windows pretty quickly, but most of the stuff you really need to do in Drupal works OK in IIS. And I think that the approach I outline below gives you the most flexibility in terms of also using the components for stuff other than Drupal.
In these instructions, I’m creating a Drupal site named “drupal-7-test”, but it doesn’t really matter what you call it.
- Get Web Platform Installer from http://www.microsoft.com/web/
platform/. - Use Web Platform Installer to install “IIS 7 Recommended Configuration.” You may also need to install URL Rewrite if you don’t already have it.
- Install MySQL via the MySQL Installer for Windows. (Do not use Web PI.) Select “developer default” to get the MySQL Server, Workbench, and a few other useful things. For configuration, select “developer machine.”
- Install PHP 5.3.x from http://www.microsoft.com/web/platform/phponwindows.aspx with Web PI. (This will pull in a few other necessary components.) (Do not install the PHP for WebMatrix — click the link on the above page.) (Oh, and the page still says “PHP 5.3.5,” though the actual installer has been updated to a more recent version.)
- In IIS Manager, go to “default web site” and click “PHP Manager”. Make a note of the location of the config file and the error log. Click “configure error reporting” and select “Development machine”. Click Apply.
- Get phpMyAdmin from http://www.phpmyadmin.net and unzip it to c:inetpubwwwrootphpmyadmin. Go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin and run through the setup.
- In phpMyAdmin, create a user named “drupal_7_test”. Click the checkbox to also create a database of the same name, and give that user all rights to it.
- Get Drupal 7 from http://drupal.org/download and unzip it to c:inetpubwwwrootdrupal-7-
test. (The standard Drupal 7 download includes a web.config that enables clean URLs for IIS, given the MS IIS Rewrite module.) - Give IIS_IUSRS modify rights to sites/default/files.
- Go to http://localhost/drupal-7-test and run through the setup. Use the MySQL database & user created earlier.
- Go to the status report in the Drupal admin and check that everything is working OK.
Random follow-up notes
It’s June 10, and I’m setting up a WIMP environment on my ThinkPad. I’ve also recently set up a WIMP environment on my new work desktop, so I’ve got a few follow-up notes on this post.