In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of Grav CMS on your Ubuntu 15.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Grav is a Fast, Simple, powerful, and Flexible file-based Modern CMS which means it doesn’t use databases to store information, it uses files to store its configurations and contents.
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 Grav CMS 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 or elementary OS.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- 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 Grav CMS 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 php5-curl openssl
Step 3. Installing Grav CMS.
The first thing to do is to go to Grav CMS’s download page and download the latest stable version of Grav CMS, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.0.10:
wget https://github.com/getgrav/grav/releases/download/1.0.10/grav-v1.0.10.zip
Unpack the Grav archive to the document root directory on your server:
mkdir -p /var/www/html/ cd /var/www/html/ unzip grav-v1.0.10.zip cd grav cp -a * ..
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/
Step 4. Configuring Apache web server for Grav CMS.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘grav.conf’ on your virtual server:
sudo a2enmod rewrite touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/grav.conf ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/grav.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/grav.conf nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/grav.conf
Add the following lines:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com DocumentRoot /var/www/html/ ServerName your-domain.com ServerAlias www.your-domain.com <Directory /var/www/html/> 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:
systemctl restart apache2.service
Step 5. Accessing the Grav content management system.
Grav CMS 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 Grav CMS. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Grav content management system on your Ubuntu 15.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Grav CMS website.
