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 Fedora 28 Vultr server instance.

Requirements

Make sure your server meets the following requirements.

• MySQL version 5.2 or greater
• PHP version 5.6 or greater
• PHP extensions:
  • curl
  • mcrypt
  • gd
  • php-mbstring
  • pdo_mysql or pdo_sqlite

NOTE: If you don’t have the necessary requirements, you will not be able to install Anchor.

Before you begin

Check the OS version.

cat /etc/fedora-release
# Fedora release 28 (Twenty Eight)

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.

Ensure that your system is up to date.

sudo dnf check-upgrade || sudo dnf upgrade -y

Set up the timezone.

timedatectl list-timezones
sudo timedatectl set-timezone 'Region/City'

Install required and useful packages.

sudo dnf install -y wget vim unzip bash-completion

For simplicity, disable SELinux and Firewall.

sudo setenforce 0
sudo systemctl stop firewalld
sudo systemctl disable firewalld

Step 1 – Install Nginx

Anchor CMS will work fine with Apache or Nginx. In this tutorial, we will use Nginx software.

Install Nginx.

sudo dnf install -y nginx

Start and enable Nginx.

sudo systemctl start nginx.service
sudo systemctl enable nginx.service

Step 2 – Install MariaDB

Install MariaDB.

sudo dnf install -y mariadb-server

Check the version.

mysql --version
# mysql  Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.2.14-MariaDB, for Linux (x86_64) using readline 5.1

Start and enable MariaDB.

sudo systemctl start mariadb.service
sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service

Run the mysql_secure_installation script to improve the security of your MariaDB installation and to set the MariaDB root user password.

sudo mysql_secure_installation

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

Install PHP and required PHP extensions.

sudo dnf install -y php-cli php-fpm php-mbstring php-curl php-mysqlnd php-sqlite3 php-mcrypt php-gd php-xml php-json

Check the PHP version.

php --version
# PHP 7.2.6 (cli) (built: May 22 2018 16:22:08) ( NTS )

Enable and start php-fpm.service.

sudo systemctl start php-fpm.service
sudo systemctl enable 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 unix:/run/php-fpm/www.sock;
    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 1.6.5 2018-05-04 11:44:59

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.