How To Install miniBB Forum on CentOS 7

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure of miniBB Forum on your CentOS 7 server.  For those of you who didn’t know, miniBB aka Mini Bulletin Board is a PHP-based standalone, open-source program for building your own Internet forums. Comparing to the other forum software available on the market, miniBB just brings what it’s created for: an easy, lite, and speedy quick forum. If you want a simple and stable message board attached to your existing website at the deepest integration level, incl. the customization of the layout to the look of your website, or even synchronizing with the existing membership system, you’ve just come across to the forum solution, developed exactly for such purpose.

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 miniBB Forum on a CentOS 7 server.

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.
• 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 miniBB Forum 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 the required PHP modules:

yum isntall php php-gd php-common php-mysql

Step 3. Installing miniBB Forum.

The first thing to do is to go to miniBB’s download page and download the latest stable version of miniBB Forum, At the moment of writing this article it is version 3.2.1:

Unpack the Simple Invoices archive to the document root directory on your server:

unzip minibb.zip -d /var/www/html

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/minibb

Now, open the ‘setup_options.php’ file which contains almost every common option of miniBB:

### nano /var/www/html/minibb/setup_options.php

$DBhost='localhost';
$DBname='minibb';
$DBusr='minibbuser';
$DBpwd='PASSWORD';
$admin_usr = 'ADMIN_USR';
$admin_pwd = 'ADMIN_PASSWORD';
$admin_email = 'admin@yourdomain.com';
$main_url='http://yourdomain.com';

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for miniBB.

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 miniBB. 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 miniBB installation:

CREATE DATABASE minibb;
CREATE USER 'minibbuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `minibb`.* TO 'minibbuser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for miniBB.

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

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

IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf

Next, create the virtual host:

mkdir /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/
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/minibb/"
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/minibb/">
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 effects:

systemctl restart httpd.service

Step 6. Accessing miniBB Forum.

Simple Invoices will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.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 miniBB. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing miniBB on your CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official miniBB website.