Building a Programmers Blog: What to deploy

One piece of feedback I've received about this series of posts was about a simple thing that I'd overlooked: If you got your site up and running using an all-in-one installer, such as the one from Acquia, how do you know what you need to deploy when you want to go-live.

When you're deploying to a hosting provider, you want to upload Drupal itself, plus any modules and themes you're using. You don't want to deploy much (if anything) else, especially if your site is going to be tight on disk space, as is common with many hosting plans.

Here is an example from one of the Drupal based websites that I maintain:

The top level www directory was provided by my hosting provider, and I uploaded the rest. All the files and folders from the Drupal project itself get uploaded inside www. Custom modules for my installation have been uploaded into www/sites/all/modules and the theme that I use for the site into www/sites/all/themes.

See also The Drupal Installation Guide on Drupal.org.

You also need a database in which Drupal will store your site content - the installation process for Drupal will only take care of setting up the connection to the database. Depending on your hosting provider, you may be able to set up the database yourself (through some kind of control panel) or you may need to request one is set up.