How To Install MyBB on Ubuntu 16.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of MyBB on your Ubuntu 16.04 server. For those of you who didn’t know, MyBB, also known as MyBBoard or MyBulletinBoard, is a very popular and free forum software developed using PHP and MySQL. With everything from forums to threads, posts to private messages, search to profiles, and reputation to warnings, MyBB features everything you need to run an efficient and captivating community.

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 MyBB on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• 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 MyBB on Ubuntu 16.04

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 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-mysql php7.0-curl php7.0-json php7.0-cgi php7.0 libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt

Step 3. Installing MyBB.

The first thing to do is to go to MyBB’s download page and download the latest stable version of MyBB, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.8.7:

wget https://resources.mybb.com/downloads/mybb_1830.zip

Unpack the MyBB archive to the document root directory on your server:

unzip mybb_1807.zip -d /var/www/html

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/html/mybb/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for MyBB.

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 MyBB. 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 MyBB installation:

MariaDB [(none)]> create database mybb;
MariaDB [(none)]> grant all privileges on mybb.* to mybbuser@localhost identified by 'your_password';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> \q

Step 4. Configuring Apache web server for MyBB.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘mybb.conf’ on your virtual server:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/mybb.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/mybb.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/mybb.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/mybb.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mybb/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/mybb/>
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>

Next, rename the config.default.php file in the inc directory to config.php since you will be asked to do this later during the MyBB installation via a browser. Execute the following:

mv inc/config.default.php inc/config.php

Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 5. Accessing MyBB.

MyBB will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/ or http://your-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 MyBB. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing MyBB in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official MyBB website.

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