In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of Elkarte on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. 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 on the Ubuntu 18.04 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.
- An active internet connection. You’ll need an internet connection to download the necessary packages and dependencies for Elkarte.
- 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 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 commands in the terminal.
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade
Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP) server.
An 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 install php7.2 libapache2-mod-php7.2 php7.2-common php7.2-mbstring php7.2-xmlrpc php7.2-soap php7.2-gd php7.2-xml php7.2-intl php7.2-mysql php7.2-cli php7.2-zip php7.2-curl
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 1.1.6:
wget https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte/releases/download/v1.1.6/ElkArte_v1-1-6_install.zip sudo mkdir /var/www/elkarte sudo unzip ElkArte_v1-1-6_install.zip -d /var/www/elkarte
We will need to change some folders permissions:
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/elkarte sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/elkarte
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Elkarte.
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 Elkarte. 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 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.
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>
Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:
sudo a2ensite elkarte.conf sudo a2enmod rewrite sudo systemctl restart apache2
Step 6. Accessing Elkarte.
Elkarte Community Forum will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your_domain.com or http://your-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 Community. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Elkarte Community Forum on your Ubuntu 18.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Elkarte website.
