How To Install DirectAdmin on Ubuntu 14.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install DirectAdmin on Ubuntu 14.04. For those of you who didn’t know, DirectAdmin is a web hosting control panel providing a graphical interface and automation tools to simplify server and account management. Features include E-mail, FTP, DNS and web management, Statistics, Apache configuration, User and reseller management, and more.

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 DirectAdmin in the Ubuntu 14.04 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 14.04.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install DirectAdmin on Ubuntu 14.04

Step 1. First of all, make sure that all packages are up to date.

apt-get -y update

Step 2. Install required packages.

apt-get install gcc g++ make flex bison openssl libssl-dev perl perl-base perl-modules libperl-dev libaio1 libaio-dev zlib1g zlib1g-dev libcap-dev bzip2 automake autoconf libtool

Step 3. Installing DirectAdmin on Ubuntu 14.04.

Run this command for downloading the DirectAdmin installation script.

wget http://www.directadmin.com/setup.sh
chmod 755 setup.sh

You can now run the installation script as thus:

./setup.sh

Once the script is running you will be prompted for your DirectAdmin client ID, license number, and the hostname of the VPS. Wait a few minutes and DirectAdmin is installed and all services are configured.

Step 4. Configuring DirectAdmin SSL Support.

By default, DirectAdmin does not support HTTPS (SSL) based connections ‘out of the box’, so some final configuration changes must be made in order to do so. Here, we’ll show you how to set up a ‘self-signed’ certificate to be used for DirectAdmin HTTPS login. Run the following from your VPS SSH command line:

/usr/bin/openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout /usr/local/directadmin/conf/cakey.pem -out /usr/local/directadmin/conf/cacert.pem -days 9000 -nodes
chown diradmin:diradmin /usr/local/directadmin/conf/cakey.pem
chmod 400 /usr/local/directadmin/conf/cakey.pem

Now we need to enable SSL within the DirectAdmin configuration:

nano /usr/local/directadmin/conf/directadmin.conf

Find the SSL=0 setting and change it to the following:

SSL=1

Restart DirectAdmin in order for the changes to take effect:

service directadmin restart

Step 4. Accessing DirectAdmin.

DirectAdmin will be available on HTTPS port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to https://your-domain.com/2222 or https://server-ip/2222. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed DirectAdmin. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing DirectAdmin on Ubuntu 14.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official DirectAdmin on the website.

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