How To Install Logaholic on CentOS 7

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of Logaholic on your CentOS 7.  For those of you who didn’t know, Logaholic is a program that allows you to track statistics for your website. These stats allow you to see things such as how many hits your site gets on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You can use these stats to compare and see trends to help your site become more efficient.

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 Logaholic on a CentOS 7 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 7.
• 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 Logaholic on CentOS 7

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

yum -y update

Step 2. Install the LAMP server.

A CentOS 7 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install the required PHP modules:

yum install php-mysql php-gd php-ldap php-xml php-xmlrpc php-mbstring php-mcrypt curl zlib

Step 3. Installing Logaholic.

The first thing to do is to go to Logaholic’s download page and download the latest stable version of Logaholic, At the moment of writing this article it is version 6 series:

wget -O logaholic.tar.gz http://www.logaholic.com/download.php?file=logaholic_she_600.tar.gz

Unpack the Elxis CMS archive to the document root directory on your server:

tar -xvzf logaholic.tar.gz
mkdir -p /var/www/html/logaholic
mv logaholic_she_600/logaholic /var/www/html

Next, download GeoLite Legacy Database, then extract and copy this file to the ‘/var/www/html/logaholic/components/geoip/’ directory on your server:

wget http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz
gunzip GeoLiteCity.dat.gz
mv GeoLiteCity.dat /var/www/html/logaholic/components/geoip/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown apache:apache -R /var/www/html/logaholic/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Logaholic.

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 Logaholic. 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 Logaholic installation:

CREATE DATABASE logaholicdb;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON logaholicdb.* TO 'logaholicuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit

Set the MySQL server time zone:

### mysql -u root -p
mysql> SET GLOBAL time_zone = '-06:00';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit

Populate the time zone tables using the following command:

mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo | mysql -u root mysql

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Logaholic.

We will create an Apache virtual host for your Logaholic website. First, create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file using a text editor of your choice:

nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf
IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf

Next, create the virtual host:

mkdir /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/
nano /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/yourdomain.com.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost YOUR_SERVER_IP:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/logaholic/"
ServerName yourdomain.com
ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com
ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log"
CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined

<Directory "/var/www/html/logaholic/">
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Save and close the file. Restart the apache service for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart httpd.service

Next, edit the Apache configuration file (by default ‘/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf’) and define the Apache log file in the following format:

CustomLog /your_path/access_log "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b \"%{Referer}i\"
\"%{User-Agent}i\""

In general, this seems to be enough:

CustomLog /your_path/access_log "combined"

Finally, edit the ‘php.ini’ file and add/modify the following lines:

allow_url_fopen = On 
display_errors = On 
output_buffering = off

Step 6. Accessing Logaholic.

Logaholic will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/install.php or http://server-ip-address/install.php 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 Logaholic. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Logaholic web analytics software on your CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Logaholic CMS website.