How To Install TYPO3 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install TYPO3 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, TYPO3 is an enterprise open-source content management system based on PHP. It’s intended for ease of use to allow owners and enterprises to create powerful and dynamic content websites. If you’re looking for a functional, higher-performance content management system to manage your websites or blogs and 100% free, then you’ll find TYPO3 to be helpful.

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 TYPO3 on an Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver).
• 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 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 TYPO3 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

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 update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP) server.

An Ubuntu 18.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have a LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

Next, run the commands below to install PHP 7.2 and related modules:

sudo apt install php7.2 libapache2-mod-php7.2 php7.2-common php7.2-gmp php7.2-curl php7.2-intl php7.2-mbstring php7.2-xmlrpc php7.2-mysql php7.2-gd php7.2-xml php7.2-cli php7.2-zip

Step 3. Installing TYPO3 on Ubuntu 18.04.

Download TYPO3 latest release you may want to use the Github repository:

Install Composer, Curl, and other dependencies:

sudo apt install curl git
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | sudo php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

Next, Download TYPO3’s latest release you may want to use the Github repository:

cd /var/www/html
sudo composer create-project typo3/cms-base-distribution typo3 ^9
sudo touch /var/www/html/typo3/public/FIRST_INSTALL

We will need to change some folders permissions:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/typo3/
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/typo3/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for TYPO3.

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 the 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 TYPO3. 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 TYPO3 installation:

CREATE DATABASE typo3;
CREATE USER 'typo3user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'new_password_here';
GRANT ALL ON typo3.* TO 'typo3user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'user_password_here' WITH GRANT OPTION;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

Step 5. Configuring Apache for TYPO3.

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

touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/typo.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/typo.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/typo.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/typo.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/typo3/public
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/typo3/public/>
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:

sudo a2ensite typo3.conf
sudo a2enmod rewrite
systemctl restart apache2.service

Next, we have to make some PHP settings. For this we go into the php.ini and adjust a few settings:

nano /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini

Then make the change to the following lines below in the file and save:

file_uploads = On
allow_url_fopen = On
short_open_tag = On
memory_limit = 256M
upload_max_filesize = 100M
max_execution_time = 360
max_input_vars = 1500
date.timezone = America/Chicago

Step 6. Accessing TYPO3 CMS.

TYPO3 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 TYPO3. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing TYPO3 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS  (Bionic Beaver) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official TYPO3 website.