In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Elkarte Community Forum on your Ubuntu 15.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Elkarte is an open-source discussion forum written in PHP that allows web developers to create a community forum fully responsive to mobile and wireless devices.
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 Elkarte Community Forum on a Ubuntu 15.04 server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 15.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- An active internet connection. You’ll need an internet connection to download the necessary packages and dependencies for Elkarte Community Forum.
- 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 Elkarte Community Forum on Ubuntu 15.04
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, PHP) server.
A Ubuntu 15.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:
sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mcrypt php5-mysql php5-gd
Step 3. Installing Elkarte Community Forum.
The first thing to do is to go to Elkarte Community Forum’s download page and download the latest stable version of Elkarte Community Forum, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.0.6:
cd /opt wget -O elkarte.zip https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte/releases/download/v1.0.6/ElkArte_v1-0-6_install.zip
Unpack the Elkarte Community Forum archive to the document root directory on your server:
mkdir -p /var/www/html/elkarte unzip -o elkarte.zip -d /var/www/html/elkarte/
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html/elkarte/
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Elkarte Community Forum.
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 Elkarte Community Forum. 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 Elkarte Community Forum installation:
CREATE DATABASE elkartedb; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON elkartedb.* TO 'elkarteuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password' WITH GRANT OPTION; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; quit
Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Elkarte Community Forum.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘elkarte.conf’ on your virtual server:
sudo a2enmod rewrite touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/elkarte.conf ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/elkarte.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/elkarte.conf nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/elkarte.conf
Add the following lines:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com DocumentRoot /var/www/html/elkarte/ ServerName your-domain.com ServerAlias www.your-domain.com <Directory /var/www/html/elkarte/> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common </VirtualHost>
Next, edit the php.ini configuration file and add/modify the following lines:
###nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini register_globals = Off post_max_size = 128M upload_max_filesize = 128M memory_limit = 128M max_execution_time = 300 max_input_time = 300 safe_mode = Off
Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:
systemctl restart apache2.service
Step 6. Accessing Elkarte Community Forum.
Elkarte Community Forum will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com or http://server-ip 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 Elkarte. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Elkarte Community Forum on your Ubuntu 15.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Elkarte Community website.
