How To Install Chamilo on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Chamilo on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Chamilo is an open-source (under GNU/GPL licensing) e-learning and content management system, aimed at improving access to education and knowledge globally. It is backed up by the Chamilo Association, which has goals including the promotion of the software, the maintenance of a clear communication channel, and the building of a network of services providers and software contributors. The Chamilo project aims at ensuring the availability and quality of education at a reduced cost, through the distribution of its software free of charge, the improvement of its interface for 3rd world countries’ devices portability, and the provision of free access to public e-learning campuses.

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 Chamilo on a Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 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).
• 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 Chamilo on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

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, and PHP) server.

A Ubuntu 18.04 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 php7.1-cli php7.1-gd php7.1-opcache php7.1-mysql php7.1-json php7.1-mcrypt php7.1-xml php7.1-curl

You’ll need to also adjust some settings in your php.ini. Open up the file and edit these two variables:

nano /etc/php/7.1/apache2/php.ini

Also, add/modify the following settings:

date.timezone = 'America/New_York'
max_execution_time = 300
max_input_time = 600
memory_limit = 256M
post_max_size = 100M
upload_max_filesize = 100M
short_open_tag = Off
safe_mode = Off
magic_quotes_gpc = Off
magic_quotes_runtime = Off
session.cookie_httponly = On
extension = xapian.so

Step 3. Installing Chamilo on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

The first thing to do is to go to Chamilo’s download page and download the latest stable version of Chamilo, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.10:

wget https://github.com/chamilo/chamilo-lms/releases/download/v1.11.6/chamilo-1.11.6-php7.zip

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

unzip chamilo-1.11.6-php7.zip -d /var/www/html/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

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

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Chamilo.

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 Chamilo. 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 Chamilo installation:

CREATE DATABASE chamilodb;
CREATE USER 'chamilouser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'Pa$$worD123';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON chamilodb.* TO 'chamilouser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Chamilo.

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

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

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common

Save and close the file. Restart the apache service for the changes to take effect:

a2ensite chamilo.conf
a2enmod rewrite
systemctl restart apache2

Step 6. Accessing Chamilo.

Chamilo will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/ or http://server-ip-address/ 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 Chamilo. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Chamilo e-learning and content management system on your Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Chamilo website.

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