ZPanel and Sentora on CentOS 6 x64

ZPanel, a popular web hosting control panel was forked in 2014 to a new project called Sentora. The Sentora team includes authors from ZPanel. Sentora is a free control panel, which can be used as an alternative for paid control panels such as DirectAdmin and cPanel. Sentora is a great option when you want to easily manage your websites, but don’t want to pay for an advanced control panel.

In this tutorial, we will be installing Sentora. It is easy to install – just follow this guide.

The tutorial assumes a fresh installation of CentOS 6 x64 (no Apache, PHP, etc…).

Step 1: Setting your domain name DNS

You will need a domain name. You can’t use Sentora without a domain name. You have to set the DNS of your domain name to point to your server with an A record. You will need a DNS server. Many domain name registrars provide free nameservers with domain names.

You will need to set an A record that points to your VPS, and one sub-domain for the Sentora panel. For example, “cp.example.com”.

Step 2: Updating all software

Before we install Sentora, we need to be sure that we have the newest version of all software installed on our server. Update everything with yum.

yum update -y

This will update all software installed on your server. If you get no errors, we can continue and install Sentora.

Step 3: Downloading the Sentora installer

Make sure you’re logged in as the root user. If you’re not, then you can’t install Sentora. Login as the root user.

Install wget. You can install it with yum:

yum install wget -y

Enter the home directory of the root user:

cd

Download the installer:

wget http://sentora.org/install

Make sure you can execute the install script:

chmod +x install

Run the installer:

./install

Step 4: Installing Sentora

The installer is now running. You will now need to follow the steps from the installer; these are quite obvious. After entering the correct information, continue with Step 5.

Step 5: Logging in

You will now need to know the login details of your Sentora install. You can find them in the passwords.txt file, which is generated in the root home directory.

Information and help

For more information about Sentora, see the official documentation. The official forums is a good place to ask for help.