How To Install Craft CMS on CentOS 7

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of Craft CMS on your CentOS 7 server.  For those of you who didn’t know, Craft is a content management system (CMS) designed for publishers who want more control and more powerful performances from their CMS. It is a PHP-based application built on the Yii framework.

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. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Craft CMS in CentOS 7.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 7.
• 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 Craft CMS on CentOS 7

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

yum -y update

Step 2. Install the LAMP server.

A CentOS 7 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install PHP among with few PHP modules:

yum install php php-pdo php-common php-mcrypt php-mbstring

Step 3. Installing Craft CMS.

The first thing to do is to go to Craft CMS’s download page and download the latest stable version of Craft CMS, At the moment of writing this article it is version 2.5:

wget https://download.craftcms.com/craft/2.5/2.5.2755/Craft-2.5.2755.zip

Unpack the Craft CMS archive to the document root directory on your server:

unzip Craft-2.5.2755.zip
mv craft/ /var/www/

Next, move the ‘public/’ directory to the document root directory on your server and change your current working directory:

mv public/ /var/www/html/
cd /var/www/html/
mv public/ craft/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R apache:apache craft/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Craft CMS.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB 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 MariaDB:

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 MariaDB console and create a database for the Craft CMS. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Craft CMS installation:

CREATE DATABASE craft;
CREATE USER 'craftuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `craft`.* TO 'craftuser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Now, we need to tell Craft how to connect to the MariaDB database. Open the db.conf file and enter the database information:

nano ../../craft/config/db.php

'server' => 'localhost',
'user' => 'craftuser',
'password' => 'PASSWORD',
'database' => 'craft',
'tablePrefix' => 'craft',

Rename the htacces file located in the ‘public/’ directory:

mv public/htaccess public/.htaccess

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Craft CMS.

We will create Apache virtual host for your Craft CMS website. First, create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file using a text editor of your choice:

nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf

IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf

Next, create the virtual host:

nano /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/yourdomain.com.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost YOUR_SERVER_IP:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/craft/"
ServerName yourdomain.com
ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com
ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log"
CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined

<Directory "/var/www/html/craft/">
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Save and close the file. Restart the apache service for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart httpd.service

Step 6. Accessing Craft CMS.

Craft CMS will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/admin or http://your-server-ip/admin 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 Craft CMS. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Craft content management system (CMS) on your CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Craft CMS website.