How To Install Cerb on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Cerb on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Cerb is a free, open-source, fast, and flexible platform for business collaboration and automation. Cerb offers a range of features for handling customer support interactions, including ticket management, email management, and live chat support. It also provides robust reporting and analytics capabilities, allowing support teams to track performance metrics and identify areas for improvement.

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 Cerb on your Ubuntu system. You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

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.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• An active internet connection. You’ll need an internet connection to download the necessary packages and dependencies for Cerb.
• 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 Cerb on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo dnf install epel-release

Step 2. Installing LAMP Stack on Ubuntu 22.04.

Before starting this tutorial, the LAMP server must be installed on your server. If you do not have LAMP Stack installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Installing Cerb on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

By default, Cerb is not available on Ubuntu 22.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to clone the Cerb installer from GitHub using git command:

cd /var/www/html
git clone https://github.com/cerb/cerb-release.git cerb

After the download is completed, change the directory to Cerb and rename the .htaccess-dist file:

cd cerb
mv .htaccess-dist .htaccess

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/cerb/
chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/cerb/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB.

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 Cerb. 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 Cerb installation:

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE cerbdb CHARACTER SET utf8;
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE USER cerbuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'your-strong-password';
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON cerbdb.* TO cerbuser@localhost;
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> EXIT;

For additional resources on installing and managing MariaDB, read the post below:

• How to install MariaDB on Ubuntu Linux √

Step 5. Configure Apache Virtual Host.

Now create the virtual host configuration file for Cerb:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/cerb.conf

Add the following file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerAdmin admin@your-domain.com
     DocumentRoot /var/www/html/cerb
     ServerName  your-domain.com

     <Directory /var/www/html/cerb/>
          Options FollowSymlinks
          AllowOverride All
          Require all granted
     </Directory>

     ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
     CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Save and close the file, then restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

sudo a2ensite cerb.conf
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo systemctl restart apache2

For additional resources on installing Apache, read the post below:

• How to install Apache on Ubuntu Linux √

Step 6. Secure Cerb with Let’s Encrypt SSL.

First, install the Certbot client using the following command below:

sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-apache2

Next, get your SSL certificate with Let’s Encrypt by following these steps:

certbot --apache -d your-domain.com

Let’s Encrypt certificates have 90 days of validity, and it is highly advisable to renew the certificates before they expire. You can test automatic renewal for your certificates by running this command:

sudo certbot renew --dry-run

Step 7. Configure Firewall.

Ubuntu 22.04 has ufw a firewall running by default. Enable connection through ports 80 HTTP and 443 HTTPS:

sudo ufw allow 'Apache FULL'
sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw status

Step 8. Accessing Cerb Web Interface.

Once successfully installed, open your web browser and access the Cerb Web UI using the URL https://your-domain.com. You will be redirected to the following page:

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Cerb. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Cerb on the Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Cerb website.