How To Install BigTree CMS on CentOS 7

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of BigTree CMS on your CentOS 7.  For those of you who didn’t know, BigTree CMS is an open-source content management system built on PHP and MySQL. It is a very extensible application with a user-friendly interface and it is very easy to use. BigTree is developed almost exclusively on the Apache webserver but it can run on IIS 7 and 8 too.

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 BigTree CMS 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.
• 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 BigTree CMS on CentOS 7

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

yum clean all
yum -y update

Step 2. Install the LAMP server.

A CentOS 7 LAMP stack server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install the required PHP modules:

yum install php-mysql php-gd php-ldap php-xml php-xmlrpc php-mbstring php-mcrypt curl zlib libtool-ltdl php-pdo

Step 3. Installing BigTree CMS.

The first thing to do is to go to BigTree CMS’s download page and download the latest stable version of BigTree. You will have to enter your email address and they will send you a link for downloading BigTree, At the moment of writing this article it is version 4.2.11:

mkdir /var/www/html/bigtree
unzip BigTreeCMS-4.2.11.zip -d /var/www/html/bigtree

We will need to change some folders permissions:

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

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

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

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for BigTree CMS.

We will create an Apache virtual host for your BigTree website. First, create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file 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/bigtree/"
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/bigtree/">
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 effect:

systemctl restart httpd.service

Step 6. Accessing BigTree CMS.

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

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