How To Install ProjectPier on Ubuntu 14.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ProjectPier on Ubuntu 14.04. For those of you who didn’t know, ProjectPier is an open-source community aimed at developing simple, powerful, and intuitive software for web-based project management and group collaboration. ProjectPier gives you a flexible system for managing projects involving multiple organizations by providing a central place for all project activity and information while integrating with users’ existing tools. ProjectPier is freely available and licensed under the Gnu Affero General Public License (AGPL), which means you’re welcome to use and modify the software as long as any changes are distributed under the same license restrictions.

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. I will show you the step-by-step installation ProjectPier on an 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.
• 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 ProjectPier on Ubuntu 14.04

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

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install the LAMP server and include some PHP extensions.

sudo apt-get install mysql-client mysql-server apache2 php5 php5-cli php5-gd php5-ldap php5-curl php5-gd php5-xml

Start service Apache web server and MySQL also enable it to start on boot of the server:

/etc/init.d/apache2 start
/etc/init.d/mysql start

Step 3. Configuring MySQL for ProjectPier.

By default, MySQL is not hardened. You can secure MySQL 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 MySQL:

mysql_secure_installation

Next, we will need to log in to the MySQL console and create a database for the ProjectPier. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MySQL root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for ProjectPier installation:

mysql> create database projectpier CHARACTER SET utf8;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON projectpier. * TO projectpier@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> quit

Configure your server to support InnoDB, if it is not set by default, and increase the max_allowed_packet variable to 128MB:

### nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf
 #skip-innodb
 max_allowed_packet = 128M

Step 4. Install ProjectPier.

Download the latest stable version of ProjectPier, At the moment of writing this article it is version 0.8.8:

cd /opt/
wget http://www.projectpier.org/files/pp088wSP2_2014-08-14.zip
mkdir -p /var/www/html/projectpier
unzip -d /var/www/html/projectpier pp088wSP2*.zip

Step 5. Configure Apache web server for ProjectPier.

Create a new virtual host in Apache:

### nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/ProjectPier.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerAdmin admin@your-domain.com
   DocumentRoot /var/www/html/projectpier/
   ServerName your-domain.com
   ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
      <Directory /var/www/html/projectpier/>
         Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
         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>

Restart the Apache service for the changes to take effect:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

We will need to change some folders permissions:

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

Step 6. Accessing ProjectPier.

ProjectPier will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/public/install or http://your-server-ip/public/install 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 ProjectPier. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing ProjectPier in Ubuntu 14.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official ProjectPier website.

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