How To Install Gibbon on CentOS 7

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of Gibbon on your CentOS 7 server. For those of you who didn’t know, Gibbon is an open-source, free, and highly flexible education management system. It helps teachers and students to address and solve daily problems. Gibbon is a flexible application with many features, such as a planner, external assessment, online application forms, messenger, etc. The administration department of the educational institutes can use this tool to complete their administrative responsibilities.

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 Gibbon 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 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 Gibbon 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. Install the LAMP server.

A CentOS 7 LAMP stack server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install the required PHP modules:

yum install php-mysql php-gd php-ldap php-xml php-xmlrpc php-mbstring php-mcrypt curl zlib libtool-ltdl php-pdo

Step 3. Installing Gibbon on CentOS.

The first thing to do is to go to Gibbon’s download page and download the latest stable version of Gibbon, At the moment of writing this article it is version 9.1.00:

wget https://github.com/GibbonEdu/core/archive/v9.1.00.zip

After downloading Gibbon you will need to unzip master.zip. To do this, run:

unzip v9.1.00.zip
mv core-9.1.00 /var/www/html/gibbon

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown apache:apache -R /var/www/html/gibbon/
chmod 777 /var/www/html/gibbon/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Gibbon.

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 Gibbon. 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 Gibbon installation:

CREATE DATABASE gibbondb;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON gibbondb.* TO 'gibbon'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Gibbon.

We will create an Apache virtual host for your Gibbon website. First create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file with using a text editor of your choice:

nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf
IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf

Next, create the virtual host:

mkdir /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/
nano /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/yourdomain.com.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost YOUR_SERVER_IP:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/gibbon/"
ServerName yourdomain.com
ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com
ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log"
CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined

<Directory "/var/www/html/gibbon/">
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Next step, Add or modify the following lines in php.ini file:

#nano /etc/php.ini

file_uploads = On
allow_url_fopen = On
register_globals = off
magic_quotes_gpc = Off
set max_input_vars = 5000
dispaly_errors = Off
error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE

Save and close the file. Restart the apache service for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart httpd

Step 6. Accessing Gibbon.

Gibbon will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/gibbon or http://server-ip/gibbon and follow the easy instructions: enter the system language, and database information, create a new administrator account, enter server settings, and organization settings and click ‘submit’ once you have filled out all of the fields. That is it. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Gibbon. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Gibbon flexible education management system on CentOS 7 server. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Gibbon website.

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