Install Drupal with Softaculous on cPanel hosting

Drupal is a powerful CMS for structured content, complex user roles and large multilingual sites. Softaculous installs a working Drupal site on cPanel hosting in minutes. Drupal is more technical than WordPress, so this guide also covers the settings to check after installation.

Before you start

• A domain or subdomain with a valid SSL certificate.
• A PHP version supported by the Drupal release, selected in MultiPHP Manager, with extensions gd, pdo_mysql, xml, mbstring, opcache and zip enabled in Select PHP Version; memory_limit 256M or more.
• An empty target folder.

Install Drupal

1. Open cPanel → Software → Softaculous Apps Installer, search Drupal (category Portals/CMS) and click Install.
2. Choose the version (the latest stable major version unless your project needs another).
3. Installation URL: https://, domain, empty directory for the root.
4. Site Settings and Admin Account: site name, admin username (not admin), strong password and email.
5. Advanced Options: database name and prefix, auto-upgrade policy and automated backups. See auto-upgrades.
6. Click Install, then log in at https://example.com/user/login.

Check the status report

Go to Reports → Status report. Drupal lists errors and warnings. Typical items on new installs:

Trusted host patterns

Edit sites/default/settings.php with File Manager (temporarily make it writable) and add:

$settings['trusted_host_patterns'] = [
  '^example\.com$',
  '^www\.example\.com$',
];

This prevents host-header attacks. Set the file back to read-only afterwards.

Cron

Drupal's automated cron runs on page visits, which slows some requests. Better: disable it under Configuration → System → Cron and add a cPanel cron job every hour that calls the cron URL shown on that page:

curl -fsS "https://example.com/cron/YOUR-CRON-KEY" >/dev/null

Updates: Softaculous or Composer?

Modern Drupal is managed with Composer. If you add modules with Composer, update with Composer too (see Composer on cPanel) and set Softaculous auto-upgrade to off, so the two methods do not conflict. For a simple site without custom Composer modules, Softaculous upgrades are fine.

Troubleshooting

• White screen: check the error log; usually memory or a missing extension.
• "The website encountered an unexpected error": see Reports → Recent log messages.
• Clean URLs not working: make sure Drupal's .htaccess exists in the root.

Next steps

• Install other apps
• Use a staging copy