Enabling mod_rewrite on fedora system with drupal

After deploying drupal on a test machine, and configuring the site, the deployment got stuck when I wanted to enable clean urls, but the check kept failing saying the the machine was not configured properly for clean urls. Most documentation on the internet and on the drupal documentation itself seems to be for debian based distros.

However the problem seemed to be that my drupal was installed on a subdirectory as a virtual host and a simple rewritebase /drupal solved the problem.

If you have the same problem, you could start solving from here.Try

 httpd -M 2>&1 | grep rew

You should get mod_rewrite.c(shared) in the listing

You could also create a index.php file on your site with the following content which you can load from your web browser.

<? phpinfo() ?>

In the list of available modules, you should be getting mod_rewrite listed.

Next, ensure that “AllowOverride all” is enabled in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Once this is done, navigate to /usr/share/drupal/.htaccess and use your favorite text editor to uncomment the line that says

 #RewriteBase /drupal

to say

 RewriteBase drupal

Now visit http://yoursite/drupal/?q=admin/settings/clean-urls (replace yoursite with the domain name or ip address of the server)

And enable the clean urls. You now have clean urls enabled in drupal on your fedora server.

Update: This happens on the default install of drupal6 on ubuntu6 too. And to access drupal on ubuntu after installing drupal6 from the repos, use http://yourdomain/drupal6 . In case you get a bunch of erros about tables not found, access http://yourdomain/drupal6/install.php