vBulletin Manual - Preparing the vBulletin Files for Upload (Windows)

To extract the files from the package, open the folder on your computer where you saved the vBulletin package and right-click on its icon, then choose Extract All from the pop-up menu.

This will open a wizard to guide you through the unzipping progress. Accept the default options suggested and the system will decompress the files from the zip package.

When the unzipping progress is complete, you will find that the process has created a new folder called upload and another called do_not_upload.

upload - This folder contains the vBulletin files that need to be uploaded to your web server.

However, before you upload the files you must make some changes to the vBulletin configuration files. The first file is located in the upload folder itself and is called config.php.bkp. The second file is located in the core/includes folder (within the upload folder) and is called config.php.new.

You will need to rename both files, so vBulletin will be able to use them.

First you must do is to rename this file from config.php.bkp to config.php (removing the temporary .bkp extension).

Second you must do is to rename this file from config.php.new to config.php (removing the temporary .new extension).

Note:

vBulletin uses URL rewrites throughout the software. This is done using URL Rewrites in an .htaccess file in the root of the vBulletin installation. However, to prevent custom htaccess rules from being overwritten on a server, we don't provide this file directly. Instead, we provide a 'dummy' file called htaccess.txt. If you don't have an existing .htaccess file in the directory that you're installing vBulletin into, rename this file from htaccess.txt to .htaccess (NOTE: The period before htaccess is important - you must name the file as shown)

If you do have an existing .htaccess file in the directory, you will need to copy the contents of the htaccess.txt file into your existing .htaccess file.

The second folder is do_not_upload - This folder contains tools to perform various tasks on your board

searchindex.php - This file will allow you to rebuild the default vBulletin search index.
vb_backup.sh - This file will allow you to run a database backup via SSH/Telnet or a scheduled backup through cron.
tools.php - This file must be uploaded to the admincp folder and allows you to perform certain tasks should your board go down or you accidentally lock yourself out of the Admin Control Panel. This file must be deleted immediately after use or it will cause a SEVERE security problem.