How To Install ExpressionEngine on Ubuntu 15.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ExpressionEngine on Ubuntu 15.04. For those of you who didn’t know, ExpressionEngine content management system software is a proprietary software designed to create stunning websites and simplify the content creation process. Developed by EllisLab, Inc., it’s a beautiful, authoritative system that is popular with individual users, companies, and non-profits that create content-driven sites. This application offers a wide range of capabilities that will suit your diverse needs.

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 ExpressionEngine on an Ubuntu 15.04 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 15.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• An active internet connection.
• 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 ExpressionEngine 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, MariaDB, 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 ExpressionEngine.

The first thing to do is to go to ExpressionEngine’s download page and download the latest stable version of ExpressionEngine, At the moment of writing this article it is version 2.10.1:

mkdir /var/www/html/eengine/

Then after the upload is finished, unzip the archive:

cd /var/www/html/eengine/
unzip ExpressionEngine_Core2.10.1.zip

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data /var/www/html/eengine/

Set the proper permissions in order to continue with the installation:

chmod 666 system/expressionengine/config/config.php
chmod 666 system/expressionengine/config/database.php
chmod 777 system/expressionengine/cache/
chmod 777 images/avatars/uploads/
chmod 777 images/captchas/
chmod 777 images/member_photos/
chmod 777 images/pm_attachments/
chmod 777 images/signature_attachments/
chmod 777 images/uploads/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for ExpressionEngine.

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 ExpressionEngine. 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 ExpressionEngine installation:

create database eengine;
grant all privileges on eengine.* to euser@localhost identified by 'your_password';
flush privileges;
exit

Step 4. Configuring Apache web server for ExpressionEngine.

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

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

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@your-domain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/eengine/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/eengine/>
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>

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

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 5. Accessing ExpressionEngine.

ExpressionEngine will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/admin.php or http://server-ip/admin.php. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

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