The Reason to Create Symlink When Enabling Drupal Multi-Site Feature

Installing one Drupal instance and have it serve for multiple web site is a very attractive feature for most of the webmaster. But, to set it up in the real world always takes you more effort then you have thought, and one of the key reason is that in Drupal official site, they have not mentioned a very important step to create symlink during the installation which make you cannot make one Drupal installation work for multiple sites.

But why you need to create symlink? Below are the reason for it.

When you setup an add-on domain in a web host, this add-on domain will point to a sub-folder which is usually different with where Drupal is installed.

In this case, when you visit the add-on domain, Drupal will not be active since it hasn't got the control to handle the URL request. So, in order to configure the multi-sites feature in Drupal, one of the key steps is to make sure all the domains point to the same directory as where Drupal is installed. When there is a request to the web site, they will be directed to Drupal, and Drupal will know how to launch a web site based on the configure information in its own system.

In a shared linux hosting environment, the add-on domain will be setup to a sub-folder automatically by the system. In order to have it point to the Drupal folder, you will have to create symlink during it. Below are the steps you can follow:

• Remove the sub-folder system has created for add-on domain.
• Create a symlink to the Drupal folder with a name the same as the sub-folder system has created

After above operation, you will have all the domain point to the directory Drupal, and then your multi-site Drupal will be able to work properly.

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