How To Install Dotclear on CentOS 6

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of Dotclear on your CentOS 6. For those of you who didn’t know, Dotclear is an open-source blog publishing application distributed under the GNU GPLv2. Developed originally by Olivier Meunier in 2002, Dotclear has now attracted a solid team of developers. Dotclear’s proposed aim is to develop software that fully respects web standards based on open-source solutions, with a multilingual interface and publishing capabilities. It is written in PHP.

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 Dotclear on the CentOS 6 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 6.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• An active internet connection. You’ll need an internet connection to download the necessary packages and dependencies for Dotclear.
• 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 Dotclear on CentOS 6

Step 1. First of all, make sure that all packages are up to date.

yum - update

Step 2. Install the LAMP server.

A CentOS 6 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install the following PHP extensions:

yum install php-xml php-mbstring php-gd

Step 3. Install Dotclear.

Download the latest stable version of Dotclear, At the moment of writing this article it is version 2.8.1:

wget http://download.dotclear.org/latest.zip
unzip latest.zip -d /var/www/html

We will need to change some folders permissions:

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

Step 4. Configuring MySQL.

By default, MySQL is not hardened. You can secure MySQL/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 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 Dotclear. 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 Dotclear installation:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE dotcleardb;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON dotcleardb.* TO 'dotclearuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'Y0ur-Passw0rd' WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit

Step 5. Accessing Dotclear.

Dotclear will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/dotclear or http://server-ip/dotclear and complete the required steps to finish the installation. You will be prompted to enter the information of your MySQL user and database created for the Dotclear installation and create your administrator account. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Dotclear. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Dotclear on CentOS 6 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Dotclear website.