How To Install Craft CMS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Craft CMS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Craft CMS is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP and based on the Yii framework. It is very popular due to its performance and full control of CMS. It is a secure and scalable CMS and comes with a lot of plugins that help you to customize your website easily.

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 Craft 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 Craft 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 Composer.

Run the following command below to install Composer to your system:

sudo php composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

You can find out your installed version of Composer by running composer -V from your terminal:

composer -V

Step 4. Installing Craft CMS on Ubuntu 20.04.

Now we create a directory for your Craft CMS project. We create a directory named craft under /var/www/html/ the directory:

mkdir /var/www/html/craft
cd /var/www/html/craft
composer create-project craftcms/craft

We will need to change some folders permissions:

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

Step 5. 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 the Craft CMS. 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 Craft CMS installation:

CREATE DATABASE craft;
CREATE USER 'craftuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `craft`.* TO 'craftuser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Step 6. Configuring Apache.

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

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/craft.conf

Add the following file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@your-domain.com
    DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/craft"
    ServerName craft.your-domain.com
    ServerAlias www.craft.your-domain.com
    <Directory "/var/www/html/craft">
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
    ErrorLog "/var/log/apache2/craft-error_log"
    CustomLog "/var/log/apache2/craft-access_log" combined
</VirtualHost>

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

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

Step 7. Configure Firewall.

Run the following commands to allow HTTP (80) and HTPPS (443) requests through the firewall.

sudo ufw allow 80/tcp
sudo ufw allow 443/tcp
sudo ufw reload

Step 8. Accessing Craft CMS Web Interface.

Once successfully installed, open your web browser and navigate the URL http://craft.your-domain.com and you should see the welcome screen:

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