How To Install Joomla on Ubuntu 16.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of Joomla CMS on your Ubuntu 16.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Joomla is a free and open-source popular content management that uses PHP and a backend database, such as MySQL. It offers a wide variety of features that make it an incredibly flexible content management system right out of the box. Furthermore, there are hundreds of free extensions written that allow users to extend its functionality and customize it to their own objectives. A major advantage of using a content management system (CMS) is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. if you are planning to publish content on your website frequently, then maybe using WordPress will be a better option for you.

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 Joomla on the Ubuntu 16.04 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 Joomla 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-mysql php7.0-curl php7.0-json php7.0-cgi php7.0 libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt

Step 3. Installing Joomla.

The first thing to do is to go to Joomla’s download page and download the latest stable version of Joomla, At the moment of writing this article it is version 3.5.1:

wget https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/releases/download/3.5.1/Joomla_3.5.1-Stable-Full_Package.zip
mkdir /var/www/html/joomla
unzip Joomla_3.5.1-Stable-Full_Package.zip -d /var/www/html/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/html
chmod -R 755 /var/www/html

By default, Apache2, installed a test HTML page in the /var/www/html a directory called index.html. Remove that page if you want to. Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Joomla.

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 Joomla. 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 Joomla installation:

CREATE DATABASE joomladb;
CREATE USER joomlauser@localhost;
SET PASSWORD FOR 'joomlauser'@'localhost' = PASSWORD("your-password");
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON joomladb.* TO 'joomlauser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Joomla.

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

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

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/>
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 Joomla.

Joomla will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/ or http://server-ip-adreess 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 Joomla. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Joomla CMS (content management system) on Ubuntu 16.04 systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Joomla website.

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