Clean Urls on Drupal6

Hello friends, I recently installed Drupal6 on my machine which operates on Ubuntu 10.04. So this being pretty new , I also wanted to change from Drupal 5 on drupalcafe.com to Drupal6 on 127.0.0.1


I basically dont like the urls to be unidentifiable and hence wanted to enable Clean Urls feature as soon as I setup my Drupal6. 


But the thing was , my system was tested and Drupal6 dint support the feature. So after a bit of ( a lot of ) googling and understanding ... I found out this very simple hack / tweak that helps you enable the feature. 


So here it is ... enjoy ... 


First what you do is , check if the mod_rewrite is available or not in Apache2.
To check , please key in the following in the terminal
( Applications > Accessories > Terminal )

apache2ctl -M

*If you dont have Apache2 installed and just Apache installed , you can try this out as well.

apachectl -M

In the output, please check if the rewrite_module is included or not.


NOTE : 
If it is not there in the list .. please leave this article and google around on " how to load the rewrite_module in Drupal6 " because though I have an idea ... I perfectly cant guide you through the process.

Update :
Just install the " rewrite_module" using the following command.

sudo a2enmod rewrite 

Then restart apache2 using the following command.

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

So continuing with the step-by-step instructions ... The following command works to enable the module without editing any files:

a2enmod rewrite

We then have to restart Apache server

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Then we move on to edit the htaccess file which can be done by using gedit.

sudo gedit /etc/drupal/6/htaccess

Then search for RewriteBase /drupal  to  RewriteBase /drupal6
Save the file and then restart Apache again.

Then move on to http://localhost/drupal6/?q=admin/settings/clean-urls and enable the Clean Urls feature.


Hope this post was useful in someways for someone.
Thanking you .. !!!