How to move drupal into a subdirectory so non-drupal content works in the original folder?

Question

I have a D7 site and then a lot of other non-drupal stuff I would like to keep in my joe/ folder on our server as joe/thing1/ joe/thing2/ etc. Right now, my folder joe/ just has the drupal installation and my other stuff is not deployed. I would like to move drupal into a subdirectory, but still have http://website/joe/ work as my original drupal site with clean urls, etc. Then I would like to be able to deploy my other stuff into http://website/joe/thing1, http://website/joe/thing2 etc.

How can I build an .htaccess file to serve drupal from a subdirectory unless a url points to an existing file? Or is that the correct way to go about this?

Answer 1

If your non-drupal files are just a few and are static content (just plain HTML files or similar) you can create symbolic links in the root Drupal foolder that point to your non-drupal files.

Webserver (Apache at least) will serve those files if the URL points to them, instead of call index.php with the URL rewriten into params.

This way if you accidentally delete root Drupal directory (for example, using an automatic core update) you only have to put the simbolic links again, not all your non-drupal files.