Reconfiguring Drupal for HostGator Site

Question

I've tried researching this dozens of ways, and I've found posts that address pieces of what I'd like to do, but not the whole thing. I tried posting this on the Drupal forums as well, but my post hasn't shown up yet. I'm pretty new to Drupal and am afraid of corrupting my current site in the process.

Current setup:

I have a primary domain with several addon domains at HostGator
I want to convert one of my addon domains (call it addon.net) to a Drupal site
To test Drupal, I created a subdomain of addon.net (cmstest.addon.net) and used QuickInstall to set it up as a Drupal site

Current folder structure in HostGator:

/home1/[username]
    cmstest.addon.net (contains Drupal files)
    public_html
        addon.net (contains html files)

What I'd like to accomplish:

I want to convert addon.net to a multi-instance Drupal site so I can have a test environment without having to maintain configuration and database changes in multiple places.
I don't want to lose the html files for the current addon.net site - if I have to back those up somewhere else just for reference, that's fine.
Ideally, I'd like to retain my current instance of Drupal as the main one and convert it to multi-instance, so I don't have to reconfigure everything from scratch.
If possible, I'd also like to retain the existing cmstest.addon.net domain as my test environment

I realize this is a lot of things, and I may have made things more difficult for myself by using QuickInstall rather than doing this manually. If it's much easier to start fresh with a manual install for addon.net and reapply all my changes once, that's still worth it if I can have a multi-instance setup with a test site moving forward.

"I tried posting this on the Drupal forums as well" - as soon as it shows up, please add the link of this post to that one, and vice versa. This will allow anyone considering posting an answer to check that your duplicate questions have not already been answered elsewhere. — halfer

scriptbox scriptbox · Accepted Answer · 2018-12-07T22:34:37

Point all of the addon domains to the same folder in cPanel & then use standard Drupal multi-site installation techniques for the routing, i.e. the default domain plus individual folders and settings.php files for each of the subdomains.

Root: sites/default/settings.php
Domain: sites/example.com/settings.php
Subdomain: sites/sub.example.com/settings.php

Run the multi-site installation sharing the same core files, themes, & modules using this addressing format for the folders in /sites with unique settings.php files & MySQL databases (or table prefixes). You can also add unique /modules & /themes folders for each site if required.

Reconfiguring Drupal for HostGator Site

1 Answers