How To Install Boonex Dolphin on Ubuntu 15.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Boonex Dolphin on your Ubuntu 15.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Boonex Dolphin is a popular social networking platform used by many webmasters. It allows them to build easy-to-use community and social media-oriented websites. Dolphin is available in both trial and paid versions. You can easily create a customized social networking site using this application. No need to hire developers and spend massive amounts of time and money, simply install dolphins, customize it, and your Facebook-like social network site is ready.

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. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Boonex Dolphin in Ubuntu 15.04.

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 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 Boonex Dolphin 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 the LAMP server.

A Ubuntu 15.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Install Boonex Dolphin.

Download the latest stable version of PunBB, At the moment of writing this article it is version 7.1:

cd /opt
wget http://get.boonex.com/Dolphin-v.7.1 -O dolphin-v.7.1.6.zip
unzip dolphin-v.7.1.6.zip
mv Dolphin-v.7.1.6 /var/www/html/dolphin

We will need to change some folders permissions:

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

Next, run the following command to make the ‘ffmpeg.exe’ file executable:

chmod 755 /var/www/html/dolphin/flash/modules/global/app/ffmpeg.exe

Install Java and ImageMagick:

apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk
apt-get install ImageMagick

Step 4. Configuring MySQL.

By default, MySQL is not hardened. You can secure MySQL 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 MySQL.

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 MySQL console and create a database for the Boonex Dolphin. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MySQL root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Boonex Dolphin installation:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE dolphindb;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON dolphindb.* TO 'dolphinuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit

Next, Edit the php.ini configuration file and add/modify the following lines:

###nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

memory_limit = 128M 
file_uploads = On    
allow_url_fopen = On
allow_url_include = Off
register_globals = Off    
safe_mode = Off
short_open_tag = On
magic_quotes_gpc = Off    
default_charset = "UTF-8"

Make sure that ‘exec’ PHP function is allowed (i.e. it is not listed in disable_functions) and ‘open_basedir’ is not set:

#php -i | grep -i disable_functions
disable_functions => no value => no value
#php -i | grep -i open_basedir
open_basedir => no value => no value

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Boonex Dolphin.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache with the following content:

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

Add the following lines to it:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/dolphin/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/dolphin/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride 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 Apache so that the changes take place:

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Accessing Boonex Dolphin.

Boonex Dolphin will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/install/index.php or http://server-ip/install/index.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 Boonex Dolphin. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Boonex Dolphin social networking platform in Ubuntu 15.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Boonex Dolphin website.

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