About Drupal multisite installations

Drupal can run multiple separate websites from a single codebase. The individual websites share code (the Drupal core, modules, and themes), but each website has its own database so they do not share content, configuration, settings, or displayed themes. This style of architecture is known as Drupal Multisite.

This configuration can be very helpful for global website management tasks, such as website upgrades, since you only have to upgrade one codebase. However, having multiple websites running from the same codebase can multiply problems, such as security issues across your websites. For a more robust solution, consider Acquia Cloud Site Factory.

To create a Drupal multisite, complete the following steps:

  1. Sign in to the Acquia Cloud interface and select your application

  2. Create an additional database for your new website.

  3. Drupal 7 and 8 use the selection rules based on the multisite aliasing file sites/sites.php, which must be present. Its optional settings will be loaded. The aliases in the array $sites will override the default directory rules. See default.settings.php for more information about setting up the file. This enables you to map multiple domains to a specific directory.

  4. Set up your aliases based on the sites/example.sites.php file.

  5. In your local code repository, go to your [docroot]/sites/ directory, and copy the /sites/example.sites.php file to sites.php in that directory.

  6. Edit sites.php to include an entry for each of your websites, mapping the website directory to the URL. For example, for a website with the URL emea.example.com and the website directory [docroot]/sites/europe, add the following line:

    $sites['emea.example.com'] = 'europe';

    For more information, see Using sites.php to specify an alternate settings.php file.

  7. Copy the /sites/default/default.settings.php file into your new website’s subdirectory, and then rename it to settings.php.

  8. In the Acquia Cloud interface, go to the Databases page, and click PHP to display the include statement (also called the require statement) for your website.

    Display the require statement

    Copy the include statement to the clipboard.

  9. Edit the settings.php file in the new website’s subdirectory, and then paste your website’s include statement to the end of the file.

  10. Commit the changes to the new website’s settings.php file (and, if applicable, sites.php file) to Acquia Cloud:

    In the following Git commit, note that the -a option commits all the changes that you made to the workspace. To commit only a specific file or directory, replace -a with the name of the folder or directory.

    git commit -a -m "Added settings.php [and sites.php] for new website."

    When you use Git, the commit command only commits your changes to your local clone of the repository. To push those changes up to your Acquia Cloud website for deployment, use the git push command to push the changes to the appropriate branch. For example, if you are deploying from a branch named master, use the following command:

    git push origin master

    Some Drupal distributions might have a .gitignore file that includes a line like this:

    # Ignore configuration files that may contain sensitive information. sites/*/settings*.php

    If it is present, delete the line, because it prevents you from being able to commit your website’s settings.php file. As an alternative, use the git add -f settings.php command to force the code commit.

  11. In your browser address bar, enter [site_URL]/install.php (where [site_URL] is the URL of the new website), and then press Enter. Continue with the standard Drupal installation procedure.

If you run a Drupal multisite on Acquia Cloud, you can add settings.php files to as many [docroot]/sites subdirectories as you need. Any domains for which you do not create a subdirectory will fall back to the [docroot]/sites/default/settings.php file and load that website.

Creating a multisite in a subdirectory of a domain

If you have a Drupal installation for a domain name (for example, example.com) and you would like to add another website that will be located in a subdirectory of the same domain (for example, example.com/subsite), the multisite configuration process is somewhat different.

  1. Ensure that you have example.com defined on your Acquia Cloud Domains page. There is no need to add additional domains that have the subdirectory appended.

  2. Add a new database for your multisite, if you have not already done so. See Working with databases for more information.

  3. Add a multisite subdirectory to the /sites directory, as described in step 3 in the preceding procedure. In our example, the multisite directory would be named something like /sites/example.com.subsite.

  4. On the Databases page, click PHP for the Acquia Cloud require statement for the new database. On your server, you should copy the default settings.php file from the /sites/default directory and add the Acquia Cloud require statement.

  5. You may need to Create a symlink in your docroot, linking the subdirectory name up one level, to the docroot. For our example, create the symlink by executing the following from the command line while in the /docroot directory:

    ln -s ../docroot subsite
  6. Add and commit the symlink and your multisite directory to your code repository.

After the changes have been propagated to the servers, you will be able to access your website at example.com/subsite. If you need to import a database, you should do that as well, or visit example.com/subsite/install.php to install a new Drupal website. You can also share database tables across a Drupal multisite.

Contact supportStill need assistance? Contact Acquia Support

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