I just finished a first version of a script to automate the somewhat tedious task of setting up a drupal instance. The script is work in progress so please be carefull. I am not very used to the python scripting language, so there may be some things that are awkward at least. Neither do I know about the internals of drupal, so it is quite likely that some of the things I do in this script are not optimal or maybe even dangerous from a security point of view. If you encounter errors or have suggestions on what to improve, please tell me so (either by adding a comment to this post or by writing me directly). The script is released under the GPL V2 or later.
Here is the description of the script as printed when called without arguments:
Usage: muybridge_install_drupal /path/to/webdir domain
This script will setup a shared drupal instance into
a directory of your choice. This directory should be one
that you just created, and contain nothing important.
The script will create a database, a database user and
the necessary files.
WARNING: This script is work in progress. You may shoot yourself in the
foot with it. Please only use it when you understand what it does.
When an error occurs at some stage, changes made until that point are NOT reverted.
Before you use the script, check the settings section in it and adapt it to your needs. The script has to be run as a user that has write access to the directory you want to install the shared instance into, as well as the sites dir of the shared drupal directory and /etc/cron.hourly/ . You will be asked for the mysql root password so that a new database and user can be created (adapting this to use another mysql user who has sufficient privileges would be trivial tough). Ok, I hope I remembered everything important - more info will be added to this post when found.