I am working with the Drupal multisite functionality. I have been asked to implement the following architecture:

mysite is a Drupal site with several angular pages. mysite/backend is a separate site with a separate user store that mostly acts as a headless Drupal system. For political reasons, it is very important that the users in mysite/backend not be stored in the same database as the users in mysite .

Anyway, from what I have read about Drupal multi-sites, I have taken the following steps.

1. I started with a working site and performed the following steps to add a second one

2. Create a symlink, making the /backend a symlink to the web root:

   ln -s backend . 

3. Add entries to my sites.php (because with our deployment workflow, the site name cannot always match with the domain name. Also allows us to test with xip.io).

   $sites['mysite.dev'] = 'mysite';  $sites['mysite.dev.backend'] = 'mysite.backend'; 

4. I created a directory named mysite.backend .

5. In mysite.backend, I created a directory corresponding to all directories in mysite.

6. In mysite.backend, I created the following settings.php file:

   $databases = array (    'default' =>    array (      'default' =>      array (        'database' => 'XXXXXX',        'username' => 'XXXXXX',        'password' => 'XXXXXX',        'host' => 'localhost',        'port' => '',        'driver' => 'mysql',        'prefix' => '',      ),    ),  );   $update_free_access = FALSE;  $drupal_hash_salt = 'k_vtgGjzCyq0mp0dsxDk1gILuEs6G5ODP5aJuQsAUuc';  $base_url = 'http://mysite.dev/backend';  // NO trailing slash!  ini_set('session.gc_probability', 1);  ini_set('session.gc_divisor', 100);  ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime', 200000);  ini_set('session.cookie_lifetime', 2000000); 

7. I go to /backend/install.php and go through the install process. Everything goes smoothly

8. I click the link to view the new site, and enter the admin login credentials (for the new site. I made it a point to have separate logins for each site)

My problem is that when I go to the /backend directory of my test site and log in with my credentials, I get the standard authentication error behavior if I login with an invalid username or password, but when I supply the correct credentials, I get redirected to /backend/node, but I see no indication of being logged in. If I try to go to the admin pages, I get an access denied error. I still see the login block. If I click the reset password link, I get a one-time login link in my email, but when I click it, I get a message that says that the link has expired.

Forgive me if this is too verbose or missing details. This seems to be a messy problem. Has anyone run into similar issues with Drupal?