In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure October CMS on your Ubuntu 16.04 server. For those of you who didn’t know, October CMS is a content management system that uses the Laravel web application framework. It is free and open-source and has been widely adopted by the developer 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 October CMS on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
- 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 October CMS 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 php7.0-gd
Step 3. Installing October CMS.
The first thing to do is to go to October CMS’s download page and download the latest stable version of October CMS:
wget http://octobercms.com/download -O octobercms.zip
Unpack the October CMS archive to the document root directory on your server:
unzip octobercms.zip -d /var/www/html/octobercms/
Set the file permissions for October CMS:
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/octobercms/ chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for October CMS.
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 October CMS. 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 the October CMS installation:
MariaDB [(none)]> create database octobercmsdb character set utf8; MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON octobercmsdb.* TO 'octobercms'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'Y0uR-Passw0rD'; MariaDB [(none)]> flush privileges; MariaDB [(none)]> quit
Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for October CMS.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘octobercms.conf’ on your virtual server:
sudo a2enmod rewrite touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/octobercms.conf ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/octobercms.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/octobercms.conf nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/octobercms.conf
Add the following lines:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com DocumentRoot /var/www/octobercms/ ServerName your-domain.com ServerAlias www.your-domain.com <Directory /var/www/octobercms/> 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 October CMS.
October CMS will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com or http://server-ip and complete the required steps to finish the installation. The default username admin and password admin. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed October CMS. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing October content management system (CMS) on your Ubuntu 16.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official October CMS website.
