Installing Pagekit CMS on CentOS 7

Pagekit is an open source CMS written in PHP. The Pagekit source code is publicly hosted on GitHub. This guide will show you how to install Pagekit CMS on a fresh CentOS 7 Vultr instance.

Requirements

Make sure your server meets the following requirements.

• Apache 2.2+ or NGINX.
• MySQL Server 5.1+ or SQLite 3.
• PHP Version 5.5.9+.
• Required PHP extensions: JSON, Session, ctype, Tokenizer, SimpleXML, DOM, mbstring, PCRE 8.0+, ZIP and PDO with MySQL or SQLite drivers.
• Optional PHP extensions: cURL, iconv and XML Parser, as well as APC or XCache for caching.

Before you begin

Check the 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

Step 1 – Install NGINX

Pagekit CMS will work fine with Apache or NGINX. In this tutorial, we will use 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 root user.

logout

Download the NGINX repository PGP key.

wget https://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key
sudo rpm --import 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

Pagekit 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 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 = http://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 root user password.

sudo mysql_secure_installation

The last step is to create new database and user for Pagekit CMS.

Login to MariaDB.

mysql -u root -p

Create 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, MySQL and NGINX

CentOS does not provide the latest PHP version in its default software repositories. We’ll need to add a Webtatic YUM repo. Follow this Vultr guide for instructions on that.

Download and install PHP 7.1 and required PHP extensions. We will also install optional PHP extensions.

sudo yum install -y php71w-cli php71w-fpm php71w-common php71w-mbstring php71w-zip php71w-mysql php71w-sqlite3 php71w-curl php71w-simplexml php71w-xml

Check the PHP version.

php --version
# PHP 7.1.11 (cli) (built: Oct 29 2017 17:26:51) ( NTS )
# Copyright (c) 1997-2017 The PHP Group
# Zend Engine v3.1.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2017 Zend Technologies

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/pagekit.conf and copy/paste the following.

server {
    listen [::]:80;
    listen 80;

    server_name example.com;

    index index.php index.html;
    root /var/www/pagekit;

    # PHP setup with query string support
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
    }

    location ~ /.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # Instead of TCP connection, you can listen on unix socket
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param  HTTP_MOD_REWRITE  On;
    }
}

Test the NGINX configuration.

sudo nginx -t

Reload NGINX.

sudo systemctl reload nginx.service 

Step 5 – Download and install Pagekit CMS

Create a document root directory.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/pagekit

Change ownership of the /var/www/pagekit directory to johndoe.

sudo chown -R johndoe:johndoe /var/www/pagekit

Navigate to the document root.

cd /var/www/pagekit

Download the latest stable release of Pagekit CMS from the command line.

wget https://github.com/pagekit/pagekit/releases/download/1.0.13/pagekit-1.0.13.zip

Unzip Pagekit CMS and remove downloaded zip file.

unzip pagekit-1.0.13.zip
rm pagekit-1.0.13.zip

Change ownership of the /var/www/pagekit directory to nginx.

sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /var/www/pagekit

Open /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf file and set user and group to nginx.

sudo vim /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf

# user = nginx
# group = nginx

Save the file and restart php-fpm.service.

sudo systemctl restart php-fpm.service

The final step is to open your domain/IP in the web browser and follow the Pagekit CMS installation wizard.

You now have Pagekit installed on your CentOS 7 server. To access the admin area of Pagekit CMS just append /admin to your site’s IP/URL.