I have seen too many times that when people install drupal locally, they have no clue about how to set up local URL aliases, so here is my solution, resulting in urls like http://d/5/profile (drupal 5 installation for some profile related project).

The first step is to set up a clean, structured environment for our installations, preferably in our home directory.

File system setup

My structure looks as the following: I created a separate “projects” directory, under which i put the “drupal” directory.