Drupal Multi / vHosts

I got picked up by the great team at Sony BMG to work on their Drupal sites* and their team is hooked up with Mac and I, of course, on a pc. Even though it is not my native platform, I am comfortable on a mac. Give two buttons on a mouse and, really, I am good to go. However, as we have a very heavy load to launch, working on a foreign platform might not be the most productive thing... so, like most all of us here to day, I needed to adapt to survive. Now, SonyBMG runs all of their sites off of a Drupal multisite installation. Luckily, I attended a seminar at the past DrupalCamp NYC to give myself a heads up about it. another good thing was that they had trouble setting up a Virtual Host on a Windows box... (they got it running, of course, but problems are a good thing at tech conferences because you learn alot more). also, Mike (ixlr8) sent me some notes from the session as a recap. Also, i found this post online which is a great summary of how to do it on Windows.

Some background

A Drupal Multisite installation is a beautiful thing. The gist is this: have many sites running off of the same D installation, each with it's separate database, so that when you update the core or a module, you only have to do it once and it will be true for all sites. Now, the first time you try (note the word try) it is going to suck because this is hard to. Why? because there are soooo many variables to work with. Also, a local install is much different than a remote install. Finally, thing specific to your set up also add to some difficulties. So, after doing some research about my environment and what I was needed it for, i came up with this list:

1. need to install a SVN. so, i picked tortoise, of course
2. grab files from SonyBMG repositories with tortoise
3. set up virtual host on my laptop
4. see if it works

The Results

Weeeeeeeell, ok so I got tortoise installed and can synch to the repositories (oh, repositories are where files are kept on a server so that developers can jack into them with a SVN, and grab, update and commit the files they are working on). On the multisite tip, i lucked out because I was using an svn, the multisite was set up for me already. however, i will do one on my own so that I can understand and know the territory. The virtual hosts, um, not so much. on an XP version, this runs smoother. on Vista, eh. But I found a workaround. (um, john, what is a virtual host? oh, how silly of me, a virtual host allows you to , on your local install, type a url like (mycoolwebsite) into your browser and go to a local (or any, really) install of website. you don't need it for multi sites... but it is effective because you can jump easily from one site to another.) however, it wasn't behaving like i expected. so, teh work around is to just change the db in the default/settings.php. which really doesn't take much doing... just not as convenient as virtual host...