How To Install Pligg CMS on Ubuntu 15.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Pligg CMS on Ubuntu 15.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Pligg is an open-source CMS (Content Management System) that can be downloaded for free. Pligg CMS helps in creating social publishing/Social Bookmarking software that encourages visitors to register on your website so that they can submit content and connect with other users. The software helps in creating websites where the stories are created and voted by members.

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 Pligg CMS on a Ubuntu 15.04 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 15.04.
• 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 Pligg CMS 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:

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

Step 3. Installing Pligg CMS.

The first thing to do is to go to Pligg’s download page and download the latest stable version of Pligg CMS, At the moment of writing this article it is version 2.0.2:

wget https://github.com/Pligg/pligg-cms/releases/download/2.0.2/2.0.2.zip

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

unzip 2.0.2.zip
mv pligg-cms-master/ /var/www/html/pligg

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/pligg

Now, before proceeding with the web installation we need to rename several files and directories:

mv settings.php.default settings.php
mv languages/lang_english.conf.default languages/lang_english.conf
mv logs.default/ logs
mv libs/dbconnect.php.default libs/dbconnect.php

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Pligg 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 Pligg. 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 Pligg installation:

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE pligg;
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON pligg.* TO 'pligguser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> \q

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Pligg CMS.

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

sudo a2enmod rewrite
touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/pligg.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/pligg.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/pligg.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/pligg.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/pligg/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/pligg/>
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 6. Accessing Pligg.

WordPress will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/install/install.php or http://your-server-ip/install/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.

After everything is completed, change the permissions of the ‘dbconnect.php’ file:

chmod 644 libs/dbconnect.php

And delete the installation directory:

rm -rf install/

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Pligg. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Pligg CMS (Content Management Systems) on your Ubuntu 15.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Pligg website.