In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Joomla on Debian 8 Jessie server. For those of you who didn’t know, Joomla is a free and open-source popular content management that uses PHP and a backend database, such as MySQL. It offers a wide variety of features that make it an incredibly flexible content management system right out of the box. Furthermore, there are hundreds of free extensions written that allow users to extend its functionality and customize it to their own objectives. A major advantage of using a content management system (CMS) is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. if you are planning to publish content on your website frequently, then maybe using WordPress will be a better option for you.
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 Joomla on a Debian 8 (Jessie).
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 8 (Jessie).
- 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 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 Joomla on Debian 8 Jessie
Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal:
apt-get update apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.
A Debian 8 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.
Step 3. Installing Joomla.
The first thing to do is to go to Joomla’s download page and download the latest stable version of Joomla, At the moment of writing this article it is version 3.7.0:
wget https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/releases/download/3.7.0/Joomla_3.7.0-Stable-Full_Package.zip mkdir /var/www/html/joomla unzip Joomla_3.7.0-Stable-Full_Package.zip -d /var/www/html/
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/html chmod -R 755 /var/www/html
By default, Apache2, installed a test HTML page in the /var/www/html a directory called index.html. Remove that page if you want to. Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:
systemctl restart apache2.service
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Joomla.
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 Joomla. 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 Joomla installation:
CREATE DATABASE joomladb;
CREATE USER joomlauser@localhost;
SET PASSWORD FOR 'joomlauser'@'localhost' = PASSWORD("your-password");
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON joomladb.* TO 'joomlauser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit
Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Joomla.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘joomla.conf’ on your virtual server:
sudo a2enmod rewrite touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/joomla.conf ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/joomla.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/joomla.conf nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/joomla.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 6. Accessing Joomla.
Joomla will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/ or http://server-ip-address 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 Joomla. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Joomla content management system (CMS) Debian 8 Jessie server. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Joomla website.
