Install phpBB on the One-Click LEMP Application

Introduction

At the time of writing, phpBB is the most popular open-source bulletin board software on the web. In this article, I will show you how to install phpBB on a Vultr server based on the One-Click LEMP application.

Prerequisites

I assume that you have deployed a One-Click LEMP Vultr server instance from scratch and have logged in as root. Non-root users will need to use the sudo command.

Step one: Create a database

The MySQL root password is saved on the app VPS in /root/.my.cnf. Use the following command to print the password to your terminal.

cat /root/.my.cnf

Next, use the credentials displayed on the screen to log into MySQL.

mysql -u root -p

Configure a new MySQL database with the following commands. You may replace the database name phpbb, the username myusername, and the password mypassword with your own ones.

create database phpbb;
create user 'myusername'@'localhost' identified by 'mypassword';
grant all privileges on phpbb.* to 'myusername'@'localhost' identified by 'mypassword' with grant option;
flush privileges;
exit;

Step two: Download the phpBB package

At the time of writing, the latest version of phpBB is 3.1.4. Download and unzip the latest phpBB package to a user-friendly directory with the following commands.

wget http://www.phpbb.com/files/release/phpBB-3.1.4.tar.bz2
tar -jxvf phpBB-3.1.4.tar.bz2
mv phpBB3/ /usr/share/nginx/html/
cd /usr/share/nginx/html/
mv phpBB3/ forum/

Step three: Configure and install phpBB from your browser

Before the installation, you need to modify the default access permissions of config.php to 777, or you will encounter a permission error.

chmod 0777 /usr/share/nginx/html/forum/config.php

Visit http://[SERVER_IP]/forum/ in your browser. Substitute the [SERVER_IP] with the IP address of your VPS.

Click the tab “INSTALL” to initialize the installation wizard. Follow the on-screen instructions to configure phpBB.

On the step of “Requirements”, you will find that the default settings of Vultr One-Click LEMP meets the requirements of installation compatibility, all you need to do is to click the button “Start install”.

On the step of “Database settings”, you need to input database parameters as specified below.

Remember to replace the database name phpbb, the database username myusername, the database password mypassword, and the table prefix phpbb_ with your own ones. Leave other fields blank.

Database type: MySQL with MySQLi Extension
Database name: phpbb
Database username: myusername
Database password: mypassword
Database table prefix: phpbb_

On the page of “Administrator details”, input the administrator’s username, password and email address.

On the page of “Advanced settings”, just click the button “Proceed to next step”, as these settings can be altered later.

On the page of “Final stage”, click the button “login”, you will be logged in as administrator. You can choose whether or not to send statistical information.

Step four: Final security checks

On the “Welcome” page, the phpBB program will warn you to perform some security cleansing checks.

From your terminal window, delete the install directory.

rm -rf /usr/share/nginx/html/forum/install/

Modify the access permissions to the file config.php.

chmod 0640 /usr/share/nginx/html/forum/config.php

Refresh your phpBB page in the browser, the security warning will disappear.

That’s it. You have installed phpBB onto your Vultr VPS.