Install Concrete5 on Ubuntu 16.04

Introduction

Concrete5 is an open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP. It has been designed for ease of use and provides a web interface that allows users to edit content directly from the page. Concrete5 can be installed on top of a LAMP stack on Ubuntu 16.04.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes that you have already created a fresh Vultr Cloud Compute instance running Ubuntu 16.04, and have root access.

Step 1: Install Apache, MySQL and PHP, and other dependencies

Comcrete5 runs on top of a LAMP stack. You will need to install Apache, PHP, MySQL and a number of other required dependencies.

apt-get update
apt-get install apache2 mysql-server php7.0 php7.0-mysql php7.0-gd php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-xml php7.0-mbstring libapache2-mod-php7.0 unzip -y

Enter a secure MySQL password when prompted.

Step 2: Setup MySQL

Once all the required packages have been installed, you can proceed with setting up MySQL. Start the installation by executing.

/usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation

Enter the MySQL password you created in Step 1. Answer the questions to complete the installation.

Would you like to setup VALIDATE PASSWORD plugin? [Y/N] N
Change the root password? [Y/N] N
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

Step 3: Create a MySQL Database for Concrete5

Login to the MySQL console.

mysql -u root -p

Enter the password you created in Step 1 to proceed. Once you are logged in to the MySQL console, create a new database for Concrete5.

mysql>CREATE DATABASE concrete5_db;

Create a new user and grant privileges to the Concrete5 database you just created. You can replace username and password with the username and password of your choice.

mysql>GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on concrete5_db.* to 'username'@'localhost' identified by 'password';
mysql>FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Exit the MySQL console.

mysql>exit

Step 4: Download & Install Concrete5

Navigate to your Apache server root directory.

cd /var/www/html

Download the Concrete5 archive from the official website, unzip it, and move the extracted files to /var/www/concrete5

wget --trust-server-names http://www.concrete5.org/download_file/-/view/96959/ -O concrete5.zip
unzip concrete5.zip
rm concrete5.zip
mv concrete5-8.2.1 concrete5
cd concrete5

Make the concrete5 directory writable by Concrete5.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/concrete5

Enable the Apache rewrite module.

sudo a2enmod rewrite

Restart Apache.

systemctl restart apache2

Step 5: Complete the installation with the Concrete5 web interface

You can now complete the installation with the Concrete5 web interface. Open your web browser and navigate to http://{your-server-ip}/concrete5 to launch the installer. During the installation you will be asked for your MySQL parameters. Use the username, password and database name you created in Step 3.

Server: localhost
MySQL Username: username
MySQL Password: password
Database Name: concrete5_db

Once the installation is complete you can move on to your newly created Concrete5 based website.