Step 6: Check the status

After installation, check the status of your site at Administration > Reports > Status report (/admin/reports/status). If this page reports any issues, resolve them.

Trusted Hosts

If you did not create a settings.php file (located in sites/default/, unless you are using a multisite setup), it was created for you by the installation script. However, the generated settings.php file does not include the "trusted host" configuration.

There is an issue to change this: Allow trusted host configuration via installer.

For an explanation of why this setting matters, see Trusted Host Settings.

Ensure settings.php is writable

The installation script attempts to make settings.php read-only. On UNIX-like systems with shell access, this can be changed with

chmod u + w sites/default/settings.php

If you have (S)FTP access to the server, you can use it to change permissions or edit the file locally and then upload it.

Edit settings.php

Find the "Trusted host configuration" section in the settings.php file and read the comments there. Add lines (either there or elsewhere in the file) listing the allowed host name patterns. For example, if your site is at www.example.com, you can add

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

The entries in this array are regular expressions, so . must be escaped, and the ^ and $ characters mark the start and end of the matched string.

If you want to allow any subdomain of example.com, you can use the regular expression \.example\.com$ or (^|\.)example\.com$: the latter matches example.com as well as subdomains. If you want to allow both example.com and www.example.com, you can use the regular expression ^(www\.)?example\.com$ or list both patterns:

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

Reset permissions on settings.php

If you made settings.php writable in the previous step, then set it back to read-only:

chmod a-w sites/default/settings.php

Configure the files directory

In most cases, the installation script creates the files directory for you. If Drupal is unable to create the directory (most likely due to insufficient permissions), follow the instructions below.

In the sites/default directory, create a new subdirectory named files/. Provide read, write, and execute permissions on the new directory to the web server (typically apache or nginx). Most FTP programs allow you to create a new directory and set its permissions.

Apache-based web server troubleshooting

If the files directory is not owned by the web server, there are two ways to proceed. These instructions assume you have shell access to the server and are using apache as the web server. If you do not have shell access, you can change the directory permissions using an FTP program.

On a UNIX-like server, you can check "how" the web server is running by executing the following commands.

For Apache 2.x:

$ ps aux | grep apache

For Apache 1.x:

$ ps aux | grep httpd

Depending on your web server, one of these commands will return a series of lines, for example:

www-data 13612 0.1 0.9 50640 20340 ? S 12:29 0:08 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

The first column is the "user" under which your web server is running. In this case, the user is www-data. To make the files directory writable by the web server, you can change its owner using the command:

$ chown -R www-data sites/default/files

If your server does not allow you to change the folder owner, the next best option is to grant group write access to the folder using the following command:

$ chmod -R 0770 sites/default/files