Drupal Developer's Journal

Here's a little Drupal Tip O' the Day for our readers. As many of you know, we're platform agnostic here at Orchestra (meaning we run Macs, Linux, Windows and more), so we often end up discovering little tricks and tips about our different OSes.

For those of you building a Drupal website from a Mac, this a handy bit of info.

Scenario: We have a hosted Drupal website that we want to Enable Clean URLs on. The website is hosted with a company like Media Temple.

Problem: When you try to Enable Clean URLs, Drupal tells you that you are missing some configuration needed.

Problem Source: When you download the Drupal installation stack from Drupal.org or Acqiua, there is a file called .htaccess in the main folder that doesn't show up. Note the (.) in front of the file name. By default, Mac OS X doesn't show hidden files, including files beginning in a dot.

Solution: Download a little app to tell Mac OS X Finder to show hidden files. The app is called TinkerTool and can be found here http://www.bresink.de/osx/0TinkerTool/download.html

Once you install TinkerTool, there is a check box to "Show Hidden Files" and then Relaunch Finder.

Now, open your Acquia Drupal installation folder and Presto! there is your .htaccess file.

Upload that file to the root of your Drupal website folders and Clean URLs should be good to go.

Leave a comment if you have any feedback on this or a better way to do it.

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