In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Monstra on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Monstra is a modern and lightweight content management system written in PHP. Monstra is the best CMS to manage a small-business website. Monstra provides amazing APIs for plugins, themes, and core developers.
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 Monstra on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
Install Monstra on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
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, and PHP) server.
A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:
apt-get install php7.0-readline php7.0-curl php7.0-gd php7.0-mbstring libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-bz2 php7.0-zip
Step 3. Installing Monstra.
The first thing to do is to go to Monstra’s download page and download the latest stable version of Monstra, At the moment of writing this article it is version 3.0.4:
wget https://bitbucket.org/Awilum/monstra/downloads/monstra-3.0.4.zip
Unpack the Monstra archive to the document root directory on your server:
unzip monstra-3.0.4.zip mv monstra-3.0.4 /var/www/html/monstra
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/monstraStep 4. Configuring Apache web server for Monstra.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘monstra.conf’ on your virtual server:
touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/monstra.conf ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/monstra.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/monstra.conf nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/monstra.conf
Add the following lines:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com DocumentRoot /var/www/html/monstra ServerName your-domain.com ServerAlias www.your-domain.com <Directory /var/www/html/monstra> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All </Directory> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common
Save and close the file. Restart the apache service for the changes to take effect:
systemctl restart apache2
Step 5. Accessing Monstra.
Monstra will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/install.php or http://server-ip-address/install.php 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 Monstra. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Monstra content management system on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Monstra website.
