How To Install Coppermine Photo Gallery on Ubuntu 15.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Coppermine Photo Gallery on Ubuntu 15.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Coppermine is a multi-purpose, fully-featured, and integrated web picture gallery script written in PHP which will allow users to organize images and photos. It also supports multiple users and the administrator of the gallery can determine the access level to the script features for each one of them. The administrator can also define the allowed actions for the unregistered users.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Coppermine Photo Gallery on an Ubuntu 15.04 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 15.04 LTS.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Coppermine Photo Gallery on Ubuntu 15.04

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server.

A Ubuntu 15.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Installing Coppermine Photo Gallery.

The first thing to do is to go to Coppermine’s download page and download the latest stable version of Coppermine Photo Gallery, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.5.40:

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/coppermine/Coppermine/1.5.x/cpg1.5.40.zip
unzip cpg1.5.40.zip
mv cpg15x/ /var/www/html/coppermine

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html/coppermine

Step 4. Configuring MySQL for Coppermine Photo Gallery.

By default, MySQL is not hardened. You can secure MySQL using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MySQL:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MySQL console and create a database for the Coppermine Photo Gallery. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MySQL root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Coppermine Photo Gallery installation:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE copperminedb;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON copperminedb.* TO 'coppermineuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Coppermine Photo Gallery.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘coppermine.conf’ on your virtual server:

touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/coppermine.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/coppermine.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/coppermine.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/coppermine.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/coppermine/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/coppermine/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Next, Edit the ‘/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini’ configuration file:

nano /etc/php5/cli/php.ini

Add/modify the following settings:

max_execution_time = 300
max_input_time = 300
memory_limit = 256M
post_max_size = 32M
upload_max_filesize = 32M

Now, we can restart the Apache web server so that the changes take place:

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Accessing Coppermine Photo Gallery.

Coppermine Photo Gallery will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/install.php or http://server-ip/install.php and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Coppermine Photo Gallery. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Coppermine Photo Gallery on your Ubuntu 15.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Coppermine Photo Gallery website.