Using a Different System?
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Installing Anchor CMS on Fedora 28
Anchor is a lightweight open source blog CMS written in PHP. Anchor’s source code is hosted on GitHub. This guide will show you how to install Anchor CMS on a fresh CentOS 7 LTS Vultr instance.
Requirements
Make sure your server meets the following requirements.
- MySQL 5.2+
- PHP 5.6+
- PHP extensions:
curl
mcrypt
gd
php-mbstring
pdo/_mysql
orpdo/_sqlite
NOTE: If you don’t have the necessary requirements, you will not be able to install Anchor.
Before you begin
Check OS version.
cat /etc/centos-release
# CentOS Linux release 7.4.1708 (Core)
Create a new non-root
user account with sudo
access and switch to it.
useradd -c "John Doe" johndoe && passwd johndoe
usermod -aG wheel johndoe
su - johndoe
NOTE: Replace johndoe
with your username.
Set up the timezone.
timedatectl list-timezones
sudo timedatectl set-timezone 'Region/City'
Ensure that your system is up to date.
sudo yum update -y
Install required and useful packages.
sudo yum install -y wget vim unzip bash-completion
Disable SELinux.
sudo setenforce 0
Step 1 – Install NGINX
Anchor CMS will work fine with Apache or NGINX. In this tutorial, we will use the latest NGINX software.
Become a root
user for a moment,
sudo su - root
Create a new file, nginx_mainline.repo
, in the /etc/yum.repos.d/
directory.
cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/nginx_mainline.repo
Then copy/paste the following lines to your terminal window and hit CTRL + D.
[nginx]
name=nginx repo
baseurl=https://nginx.org/packages/mainline/centos/7/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
Logout from the root
user.
exit
Download the NGINX repository PGP key.
wget https://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key
sudo rpm --import nginx_signing.key
rm nginx_signing.key
Install NGINX.
sudo yum install -y nginx
Start and enable NGINX.
sudo systemctl enable nginx.service && sudo systemctl start nginx.service
Step 2 – Install MySQL or MariaDB
Anchor supports MySQL and SQLite databases. In this tutorial, however, we will be using the MariaDB database, which is a drop in replacement of MySQL.
Create a MariaDB YUM repository for CentOS.
sudo vim /etc/yum.repos.d/MariaDB.repo
Copy/paste the following into it.
# MariaDB 10.2 CentOS repository list - created 2017-12-11 23:19 UTC
# http://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/repositories/
[mariadb]
name=MariaDB
baseurl=https://yum.mariadb.org/10.2/centos7-amd64
gpgkey=https://yum.mariadb.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-MariaDB
gpgcheck=1
After the file is in place, install MariaDB.
sudo yum install -y MariaDB-server MariaDB-client
Start and enable MariaDB.
sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service && sudo systemctl start mariadb.service
Run the mysql_secure_installation
script to improve the security of your MariaDB installation and to set the root
user password.
sudo mysql_secure_installation
The last step is to create a new database and user for Anchor CMS.
Login to MariaDB.
mysql -u root -p
Create the database and user.
CREATE DATABASE db_name;
GRANT ALL ON db_name.* TO 'user' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Exit from MariaDB.
exit
Step 3 – Install PHP and required PHP extensions
CentOS does not provide the newer PHP versions in its default software repositories. We’ll need to add a Webtatic YUM repo. Follow this Vultr guide for instructions on that.
Install PHP 7.2 and PHP required extensions.
sudo yum install -y php72w-cli php72w-fpm php72w-mbstring php72w-curl php72w-mysql php72w-sqlite3 php72w-mcrypt php72w-gd php72w-dom
Check the PHP version.
php --version
# PHP 7.2.2 (cli) (built: Feb 4 2018 10:14:07) ( NTS )
Enable and start php-fpm.service
.
sudo systemctl enable php-fpm.service && sudo systemctl start php-fpm.service
Step 4 – Configure NGINX
Run sudo vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/anchor.conf
and populate it with the following configuration.
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
root /var/www/anchor;
index index.php index.html;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;
}
location ~ /.php$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}
Test the NGINX configuration.
sudo nginx -t
Reload NGINX.
sudo systemctl reload nginx.service
Step 5 – Download and install Composer
To successfully install Anchor, we will need to install Composer.
php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '544e09ee996cdf60ece3804abc52599c22b1f40f4323403c44d44fdfdd586475ca9813a858088ffbc1f233e9b180f061') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
Check the Composer version.
composer --version
# Composer version 1.6.3 2018-01-31 16:28:17
Step 6 – Download and install Anchor CMS
Create a document root directory.
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/anchor
Change ownership of the /var/www/anchor
directory to johndoe
.
sudo chown -R johndoe:johndoe /var/www/anchor
Go to the document root directory.
cd /var/www/anchor
Download the latest release of Anchor CMS.
composer create-project anchorcms/anchor-cms .
Change ownership of the /var/www/anchor
directory to nginx
.
sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /var/www/anchor
Open /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf
and set the user and group to nginx
.
sudo vim /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf
# user = nginx
# group = nginx
Restart php-fpm.service
.
sudo systemctl restart php-fpm.service
Create /var/lib/php/session/
and change ownership to user nginx
.
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/php/session/ && sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /var/lib/php/session/
Using your preferred web browser, open your site and follow the Anchor CMS
installer. After following the installer you will have Anchor up and running. To access the Anchor admin area just append /admin
to your site URL. For security purposes, delete the /var/www/anchor/install
directory when you are done with the installation.
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