How To Install Pixie on Ubuntu 15.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Pixie on Ubuntu 15.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Pixie is an open-source web application that will help you quickly create and maintain your own website. Many people refer to this type of software as a “content management system”, we prefer to call it a small, simple, website maker. Pixie has been designed to be simple to use and easy to develop.

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 Pixie CMS on an Ubuntu 15.04 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04, 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. You’ll need an internet connection to download the necessary packages and dependencies for Pixie CMS.
• 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 Pixie 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. Also, install all required PHP modules:

apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mcrypt php5-mysql php5-gd php5-curl

Step 3. Installing Pixie.

The first thing to do is to go to Pixie’s download page and download the latest stable version of Pixie, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.0.4:

wget http://pixie-cms.googlecode.com/files/pixie_v1.04.zip

Unpack the Pixie archive to the document root directory on your server:

unzip pixie_v1.04.zip
mv pixie_v1.04/ /var/www/html/pixie/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

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

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Pixie.

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 Pixie. 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 Pixie installation:

CREATE DATABASE pixie;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON pixie.* TO 'pixieuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
\q

Step 4. Configuring Apache web server for Pixie.

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

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

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/pixie/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/pixie/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from 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 Pixie.

Pixie will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/ or http://your-server-ip 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. Once you finish the installation you can access the admin section at:

http://yourdomain.com/admin.php

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