How To Install Matomo on Rocky Linux 9
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Matomo on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Matomo (formerly Piwik) is a free and open-source web analytics software. With Matomo, you can track, analyze, and report your website traffic with ease. It is an alternative to other commercial analytics platforms like Google Analytics and is highly customizable, secure, and private.
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 Matomo on Rocky Linux. 9.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Rocky Linux 9.
- 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).
- An active internet connection. You’ll need an internet connection to download the necessary packages and dependencies for Matomo.
- 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 Matomo on Rocky Linux 9
Step 1. The first step is to update your system to the latest version of the package list. To do so, run the following commands:
sudo dnf check-update sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled crb
Step 2. Installing Apache.
By default, Apache is available on the Rocky Linux 9 base repository. Now we install the latest version of Apache using dnf the command:
sudo dnf install httpd httpd-tools
You can start the httpd service and configure it to run on startup by entering the following commands:
sudo systemctl start httpd sudo systemctl enable httpd sudo systemctl status httpd
To make your pages available to the public, you will have to edit your firewall rules to allow HTTP and HTTPS requests on your web server by using the following commands:
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https sudo firewall-cmd --reload
For additional resources on installing Apache, read the post below:
Step 3. Installing PHP.
PHP is a popular scripting language that powers the dynamic content of millions of websites and apps. Now we run the commands below to install PHP:
sudo dnf epel-release sudo dnf install https://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-9.rpm sudo dnf --disablerepo="*" --enablerepo="remi-safe" list available sudo dnf module enable php:remi-8.1
Once Remi PHP 8.1 module is enabled, you can now install PHP 8.1 and commonly used PHP extensions as follows:
dnf install php php-cli php-mysqlnd php-opcache php-xml php-gd php-soap php-pdo php-bcmath php-intl php-mbstring php-json php-iconv php-zip unzip
Check and verify the installed version:
php -v
For additional resources on installing PHP, read the post below:
Step 4. Installing MariaDB.
By default, MariaDB is available on the Rocky Linux 9 base repository. Simply install the MariaDB package by using the dnf command:
sudo dnf install mariadb-server mariadb
After the installation is completed, start the service of the Database server and then enable the same, so that it could start itself automatically with the system reboot:
sudo systemctl restart mariadb sudo systemctl status mariadb sudo systemctl enable mariadb
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
First, log into the MariaDB shell with the following command:
mysql
Now we create a database and user for Magento with the following command:
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE matomo; MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE USER 'matomo'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-strong-password'; MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL ON matomo.* TO 'matomo'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-strong-password' WITH GRANT OPTION; MariaDB [(none)]> flush privileges; MariaDB [(none)]> exit;
For additional resources on installing MariaDB Database, read the post below:
Step 5. Installing Matomo on Rocky Linux 9.
Now run the following command below to download the latest version of Matomo from the official page of your Rocky Linux system:
wget https://builds.matomo.org/matomo-latest.zip
Next, extract the Matomo package using the following command:
tar xvf matomo-latest.zip
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/matomo chmod -R 775 /var/www/html/matomo
Step 6. Configure Apache.
Now we configure the Matomo VirtualHost file using the following command below:
nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/matomo.conf
Add the following file:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin admin@your-domain.com ServerName matomo.your-domain.com DocumentRoot /var/www/html/matomo/ DirectoryIndex index.php <Directory /var/www/html/matomo/> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/matomo_error.log CustomLog /var/log/httpd/matomo_access.log combined </VirtualHost>
Save and close the file, then restart the Apache service to apply the changes:
sudo systemctl restart httpd
Step 7. Accessing Matomo Web Interface.
Once successfully installed, open your web browser and access Matomo using the URL http://your-domain.com. You will be redirected to the following page:
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Matomo. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Matomo web analytics on your Rocky Linux 9 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Matomo website.
