Sunday, November 15, 2009

Manually Installing DotNetNuke on GoDaddy

These steps detail the process of manually installing DotNetNuke to the root of an empty GoDaddy hosted domain.

  1. Acquire DotNetNuke

    • Go to http://www.dotnetnuke.com/ and login (note: if you're not registered, then you'll have to register before you can login)

    • Click the "DOWNLOAD" icon at the top of the page

    • Download the edition of your choice (I chose Community)

    • Unzip the file to the directory of your choice



  2. Virtual directory setup

    • Login to GoDaddy

    • Hover over "Hosting" on the menu bar and click the "My Hosting Account" link

    • Click "Manage Account" next to the site to which you want to install DNN. This will take you to GoDaddy's Hosting Control Center.

    • Hover over the "Content" tab and click the "File Manager" link

    • Select the "[Root]" row by clicking on it or checking the checkbox

    • Click the "Permissions" icon on the toolbar

    • Check the "Read", "Write", and "Reset all children to inherit" and click OK (this needs to occur because DotNetNuke writes to its directory and sub-directories for many reasons, the most common is module installation)



  3. Database setup

    • In GoDaddy's Hosting Control Center, hover over the "Databases" tab and click the "SQL Server" link

    • Click the "Create Database" button

    • In the description type something descriptive like "www.mydomain.com DotNetNuke Database"

    • Check the DSN and ASP Schema checkboxes (this tells GoDaddy's database creation script to create a Data Source Name for the database and to Create the tables for the ASP Schema - e.g. aspnet_Applications, aspnet_Roles, etc.)

    • (Optional) If you want remote admin access to the database, check the "Yes" radio button under "Allow Direct Database Access" (this allows external access to the database - e.g. you can connect to it using SQL Server Management Studio on your own PC)

    • Enter a name for the database in the "SQL Server Database/User Name" field - e.g. mydomaindnn (this will be the name of the database and the user name for used for DNN's access)

    • Pick a good password, but be mindful of GoDaddy's password requirements. Write down this password as you'll need it to edit the web.config in a future step.

    • (Optional) If you'd like to create an user with read-only access this database, fill out the remaining fields correlating to "Read-Only User"

    • Click OK (You'll be taken back to teh SQL Server databases page and the status of your database will be "Pending Setup" - this should only be the case for a few minutes)

    • Click the "Edit/View Details" icon for your database in the "Actions" column. This page contains the values you'll need for changing the web.config in the next step.



  4. Web.Config

    • On your PC, go to the directory where you unzipped the DNN installation files.

    • Rename web.config to original-web.config

    • Rename release.config to web.config

    • Open web.config in your favorite editor

    • In the conectionStrings section, fully comment out the SQLExpress connection string (it contains "Data Source=.\SQLExpress"), and uncomment the SQL Server connection string (it contains "Server=(local)"). Change the SQL Server connection string include the database values seen on GoDaddy (Server is Host Name; Database is Database Name; uid is User Name and pwd is the password you entered for this user when you set up the datbase).

    • Repeat the above step for the connections strings found in the appSettings section just a few lines below.



  5. Upload via FTP

    • Configure your FTP clint (FileZilla, or CuteFtp, or the like) to point to ftp.mydomain.com, with your GoDaddy username/passoword (or another FTP user for whom you've register FTP credentials through the GoDaddy Control Center).

    • Connect

    • Once connected, you can delete everything in the root except the _db_backups and _hcc_thumbs directories.

    • This upload the contents of the directory to which you unzipped the DNN installation files.



  6. You are ready to install

    • Navigate to the www.mydomain.com

    • Follow the steps to walk through creating your site (Note: choosing the Auto option is recommended.)

    • For SMTP settings, use

      server: relay-hosting.secureserver.net

      basic

      username: emailuser@mydomain.com

      password: [emailuser's email password]

      * Make sure to Test the settings before you move on!