In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of Oxwall on your Ubuntu 15.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Oxwall is an open-source social networking software platform that is very flexible and very easy to use. It is written in PHP and uses MySQL as a database to store its data. Many plugins are available in the Oxwall Store in order to improve the basic functionality of the social networking platform. Oxwall is used for a wide range of projects starting from family sites and custom social networks to collaboration tools and enterprise community solutions.
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 Oxwall on a Ubuntu 15.04 server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 15.04.
- 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 Oxwall on Ubuntu 15.04
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 15.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:
sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mcrypt php5-mysql php5-gd
Step 3. Installing Oxwall.
The first thing to do is to go to Oxwall’s download page and download the latest stable version of Oxwall, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.8.1:
wget https://github.com/oxwall/oxwall/archive/refs/tags/core-1.8.7.zip
Unpack the Oxwall archive to the document root directory on your server:
mkdir /var/www/html/oxwall/ uunzip core-1.8.7.zip -d /var/www/html/oxwall/
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html/oxwall/
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Oxwall.
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 Oxwall. 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 Oxwall installation:
MariaDB > CREATE DATABASE oxwalldb; MariaDB > GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON oxwalldb.* TO 'oxwalluser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password' WITH GRANT OPTION; MariaDB > FLUSH PRIVILEGES; MariaDB > quit
Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Oxwall.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘oxwall.conf’ on your virtual server:
sudo a2enmod rewrite touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/oxwall.conf ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/oxwall.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/oxwall.conf nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/oxwall.conf
Add the following lines:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com DocumentRoot /var/www/html/oxwall/ ServerName your-domain.com ServerAlias www.your-domain.com <Directory /var/www/html/oxwall/> 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 Oxwall.
Oxwall will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. To access the Oxwall installation via the web and continue with the online instructions you need to edit the configuration of your web server and set up your domain name’s document root to point to the Oxwall installation directory. In this case, the Oxwall installation directory is /var/www/html/oxwall. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/install or http://server-ip/install 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 Oxwall. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Oxwall open-source social networking in CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Oxwall website.
