Copy and Extract the Drupal Distribution

In this step, we will copy the Drupal distribution to our web hosting account and then extract the contents. To copy and extract the Drupal distribution, follow these simple steps:

• Download the Drupal 5.1 distribution from the drupal.org website. The distribution is provided as a single compressed file called drupal-5.1.tar.gz.
• Using your FTP client, copy the drupal-5.1.tar.gz file into the web content folder of your hosted account. For most users, this will be a folder called public_html or www.

  In our FileZilla example, we simply drag the drupal-5.1.tar.gz file from the left column, and drop it into the public_html folder on the right.
  

• We need to extract the contents from the compressed drupal-5.1.tar.gz file. To do this, we will use the CPanel File Manager component. To access the CPanel for your account, point your browser to www.yourdomain.com/cpanel. You will have to enter your account name and password, and then you will see the CPanel page. Click the File Manager icon.
  
• The File Manager will open in a new window that will list the contents of your hosted account root folder.
  
• Click on the folder icon next to your web content folder (usually public_html or www), and the contents of that folder will be displayed. We should see the drupal-5.1.tar.gz file in this folder. Click on the filename of the drupal-5.1.tar.gz file and a list of file options will appear in the upper right column.
  
• Select the Extract File Contents option from the right column, and the File Manager will open a new window listing all of the files it extracts from the Drupal distribution. You can close this window, and we'll go look at the extracted files using our FTP client.
  
• We can see from our FTP client that the files were extracted into a folder called Drupal-5.1. This is fine if you want to run Drupal from a folder or with other non-Drupal content. But if you want Drupal to be your site home page, you will want to move the files from this folder up one level to the public_html folder.

  There are several complex ways to move these files, but we're going to use a really simple way. Using our FTP client, we double click the Drupal-5.1 folder to reveal its contents. We then select all of the files in this folder, drag them to the .. folder at the top of the list that indicates the parent folder, and drop them in.
  

• The Drupal distribution files are now in the proper location. Using your FTP client, you can delete the now empty Drupal-5.1 folder and the original drupal-5.1.tar.gz distribution file. You are now done with step 1!

What if this step didn't work for me?

Web hosting companies will have different options available to CPanel users depending of which version of the CPanel software they use. If for some reason you are unable to extract the drupal-5.1.tar.gz file using the CPanel File Manager, there is another option.

You can simply extract the drupal-5.1.tar.gz file (we use WinRAR for this) to a local folder called drupal-5.1, and then use your FTP client to copy this local folder to the public_html folder of your host account.

The disadvantage of this method is that the FTP client will take much longer to copy the extracted folder than it does to copy the single compressed file.