In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Cockpit on your CentOS 7. For those of you who didn’t know, Cockpit is a free and open-source server management software that makes us easy to administer our GNU/Linux servers via its beautiful web interface frontend. Using this application, anyone can easily administer multiple remote headless servers on the go. Don’t compare it with advanced server management tools like Webmin or anything, Cockpit is just a beginner-friendly server management interface tool for managing the remote servers, not managing the remote server’s applications.
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 Cockpit 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 useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install Cockpit 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. Installing Cockpit.
Cockpit packages are available in the official repository of CentOS. So, we’ll simply install it using yum manager:
yum install cockpit
After installing Cockpit on your system, start all required services:
systemctl start cockpit systemctl enable cockpit.socket
Step 3. Configure Firewall for Cockpit.
Add Cockpit to the list of trusted services in FirewallD:
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=cockpit firewall-cmd --reload
Step 4. Accessing Cockpit Web Interface.
Cockpit CMS will be available on HTTP port 9090 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com:9090 or http://server-ip:9090 and complete the required steps to finish the installation. We’ll be asked to enter the login details in order to enter them into the dashboard. Here, the username and password are the same as that the login details we use to login into our Linux server. If you are using a firewall, please open port 9090 to enable access to the control panel.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed the Cockpit. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Cockpit content management system on your CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Cockpit website.
