How To Install Backdrop CMS on Ubuntu 16.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of Backdrop CMS on your Ubuntu 16.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Backdrop CMS is a full-featured content management system that allows non-technical users to manage a wide variety of content. It can be used to create all kinds of websites including blogs, image galleries, social networks, intranets, and more.

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 Backdrop CMS on an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (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.
• 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 Backdrop 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 php7.0-cli php7.0-mbstring php7.0-mysql php7.0-gd php7.0-mcrypt libgd-tools php-pear

Step 3. Installing Backdrop CMS.

The first thing to do is to go to Backdrop CMS’s download page and download the latest stable version of Backdrop CMS, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.4.3:

wget https://github.com/backdrop/backdrop/releases/download/1.4.3/backdrop.zip

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

unzip backdrop.zip
mkdir -p /var/www/html
mv backdrop /var/www/html

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/backdrop/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Backdrop 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 Backdrop 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 Backdrop CMS installation:

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE backdropdb character set UTF8;
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mahara.* TO 'backdropuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> \q

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Backdrop CMS.

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

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

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/backdrop/"
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory "/var/www/html/backdrop/">
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 Backdrop content management system.

Backdrop CMS 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 Backdrop CMS. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Backdrop CMS (content management system) on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Backdrop CMS website.

Save