Drupal 8

Reconfigure the Directories

If your account has been recently created then you can skip this section as the modification it describes is now the default on site creation.

This step requires shell access. Web hosting offers separate directories for HTTP and HTTPS content; however, Drupal expects both to pull their content from one combined location. To accommodate, we ask that you simply rename one of the directories and create symlink to the other one.

If you do not wish to attempt shell commands yourself then please submit a request to the Web Hosting team and we will do it for you. This only needs to occur once so it may not be worth the time and effort to request shell access, learn UNIX command line, etc. Also, while the SFTP protocol (sort of) supports symlinks, traditional FTP does not and, therefore, neither do many of the more popular FTP clients. Therefore we do not generally recommend attempting the process without using a shell.

From a command line:

cdweb
mv htsdocs htsdocs.bak && ln -s /usr/local/webs/<siteID>/htdocs htsdocs

Upload & Complete Initial Installation

Download the latest version of Drupal 8 and decompress the files.  Upload all of the files to the htdocs/ directory on your Web Hosting account. Open your website at https://yoursite.osu.edu/ and follow the instructions in the installation wizard. (Please use HTTPS as you’ll be setting passwords which should be encrypted in-transit)

Configuration

By this point you should have a functional Drupal 8 instance.  The following will customize pieces of it for the OTDI Web Hosting environment.

Temporary Directory

OTDI Web Hosting is a shared system that uses multiple web servers so using the standard /tmp is not an option both for load-balancing and security reasons.  As such, you may need to change it to the account’s dedicated one if it defaults something like /tmp or /usr/local/tmp.

On the top navbar select Configuration -> Media -> File System and then change Temporary directory to “/usr/local/webs/<siteID>/tmp”.

Load Balancer Awareness (optional but highly recommended)

While technically optional this is still highly recommended. Drupal should be made aware of the AWS Elastic Loadbalancer we use to provide various speed and availability enhancements. If you plan to use any plugins that use client IP addresses in some way, it becomes mandatory. Open sites/default/settings.php and set the following options:

$settings['reverse_proxy'] = TRUE;
$settings['reverse_proxy_addresses'] = array($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
$settings['reverse_proxy_header'] = 'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR';

These settings already exist in settings.php but are commented out by default.

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