In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gogs on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Gogs is a free and open-source self-hosted Git service written in the Go programming language. It is very similar to GitLab and aims to be the easiest and most painless way to set up a self-hosted Git service in your development environment.
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 Gogs on the Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
- 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 useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install Gogs on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
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, and 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-curl php7.0-gd php7.0-mbstring php7.0-mysql libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-zip
Step 3. Installing Gogs.
The first thing to do is to go to Gogs’s download page and download the latest stable version of Gogs, At the moment of writing this article it is version 0.11.4:
cd /opt && wget https://dl.gogs.io/0.11.4/linux_amd64.zip
Unpack the Gogs archive to the document root directory on your server:
unzip linux_amd64.zip mv gogs/ /var/www/html/gogs
Next, change the directory to the Gogs and run the following command to start Gogs:
cd /var/www/html/gogs ./gogs web &
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Gogs.
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 Gogs. 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 Gogs installation:
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE gogs; MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON gogs.* TO 'gogs'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your_gogs_password'; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; MariaDB [(none)]> \q
Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Gogs.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘gogs.conf’ on your virtual server:
sudo a2enmod rewrite touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/gogs.conf ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/gogs.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/gogs.conf nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/gogs.conf
Add the following lines:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com DocumentRoot /var/www/html/gogs/ ServerName your-domain.com ServerAlias www.your-domain.com <Directory /var/www/html/gogs/> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> ProxyRequests Off ProxyPass / http://192.168.77.20:3000/ ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.77.20:3000/ 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 Gogs.
Gogs will be available on HTTP ports 80 and 3000 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 Gogs. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Gogs in Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Gogs website.
