How To Install Concrete5 CMS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Concrete5 CMS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Concrete is an open-source content management system for teams. It is written in PHP and uses MariaDB as a database backend. It provides an easy-to-use builder that helps you to create pages and content through the web browser. It is flexible, secure, mobile-ready, and based on Model-View-Controller architecture.

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 the Concrete5 Content Management System on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, 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 Concrete5 CMS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

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

Step 2. Installing the LAMP stack.

A Ubuntu 20.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Installing Concrete5 CMS on Ubuntu 20.04.

Now we download the latest version of Concrete5 from the official page:

wget https://www.concretecms.org/application/files/3916/3649/1545/concrete-cms-9.0.1.zip
unzip concrete-cms-9.0.1.zip
sudo mv concrete-cms-9.0.1 /var/www/html/concrete5

We will need to change some folders permissions:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/concrete5/
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/concrete

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 Concrete5. 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 Concrete5 installation:

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE concrete5;
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE USER 'concrete5user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-strong-passwd';
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL ON concrete5.* TO 'concrete5user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-strong-passwd' WITH GRANT OPTION;
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> EXIT;

Step 5. Configure Apache.

Now run the commands below to create a new configuration file called concrete5.conf:

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/concrete5.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerAdmin admin@your-domain.com
     DocumentRoot /var/www/html/concrete5/
     ServerName your-domain.com

     <Directory /var/www/html/concrete5/>
        Options +FollowSymlinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
     </Directory>

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

</VirtualHost>

Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo a2ensite concrete5.conf 
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Step 6. Accessing Concrete5 Web Interface.

Once successfully complete step-by-steps, open your web browser and access the Concrete5 CMS web interface using the URL http://your-domain-com. You will be redirected to the following page:

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Concrete5. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Concrete5 Content Management System on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Concrete5 website.