How to Install BoltWire on Debian 9

Introduction

BoltWire is a free and lightweight content management system written in PHP. Compared to most other CMSes, the installation of BoltWire is easy and straightforward. This article will go over the prerequisites of BoltWire and the installation procedure on Debian 9.

Prerequisites

• A Fresh Vultr VPS running Debian 9.
• Root SSH access or any user with sudo privileges.

Installation

Pre-Install:

If you are logged in as a user other than root on your Vultr server, run sudo -i or su - to obtain a temporary root shell before starting the installation.

First, before installing BoltWire, the VPS must have a web server installed and ready to use. This article will use Apache2.

Install Apache, PHP, their dependencies and other required packages:

apt install -y apache2 apache2-bin apache2-data apache2-utils libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libapache2-mod-php7.0 php php-common php7.0 php7.0-cli php7.0-common php7.0-json php7.0-opcache php7.0-readline psmisc wget unzip

Make sure Apache is started and enabled:

systemctl enable apache2; systemctl start apache2

Open a web browser and navigate to http://YOUR_VPS_IP. You will see the “Apache2 Debian Default Page“.

BoltWire Installation:

From your local machine, go to the offical BoltWire Download Page, click the “Download” button and copy the direct download link, then download it in your web root using wget:

cd /var/www/html/; wget https://www.boltwire.com/files/6/boltwire6.01.zip

Now, unzip the downloaded zip file:

unzip boltwire6.01.zip

You will see a newly created directory boltwire. You can now delete the zip file:

rm boltwire6.01.zip

In order for the web application to work properly, we need to give Apache ownership of these files:

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

On your local machine, go to http://YOUR_VPS_IP/boltwire/start.php:

You will be asked to enter a password. Choose a password complex enough to adhere to the best security practices. Then press ENTER.

On the second page, site creation begins. You will have to enter the password you chose on the previous page, and choose a site name, along with other options. You should set “Yes” for the “Encryption” option, otherwise passwords will be stored insecurely.

Click on “Create Site“.

Your first BoltWire site is now live. You can access it at http://YOUR_VPS_IP/site_name/index.php, replace site_name with the site name you chose earlier. After logging in with the admin account, you’ll be able to create, manage, and modify the site.