How To Install BlogoText CMS on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

BlogoText is an open source, lightweight, web publishing platform (CMS) for creating minimalist blogs and websites.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation BlogoText CMS on a Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) server.

BlogoText features:

    • Blog with comments and RSS feeds
    • Links sharing
    • RSS Reader
    • Images/Files uploading and sharing
    • JSON/ZIP/HTML import-export; WordPress import
    • Support Addons

Install BlogoText CMS on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB and PHP) server.

A Ubuntu 18.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also install all required PHP modules:

apt-get install php7.1-cli php7.1-mbstring php7.1-gd php7.1-opcache php7.1-mysql php7.1-json php7.1-mcrypt php7.1-xml php7.1-curl

You’ll need to also adjust some settings in your php.ini. Open up the file and edit these two variables:

nano /etc/php/7.1/apache2/php.ini

Also, add/modify the following settings:

date.timezone = 'America/New_York'
file_uploads = On
allow_url_fopen = On
short_open_tag = On
memory_limit = 256M
upload_max_filesize = 100M
max_execution_time = 360

Step 3. Installing BlogoText CMS on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

First thing to do is to go to BlogoText’s download page and download the latest stable version of BlogoText, At the moment of writing this article it is version 3.7:

https://github.com/BlogoText/blogotext/archive/3.7.6.zip
unzip 3.7.6.zip
sudo mv blogotext-3.7.6 /var/www/html/blogotext

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/blogotext/
chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/blogotext/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for BlogoText CMS.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each steps carefully which will set root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the BlogoText CMS. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for BlogoText CMS installation:

CREATE DATABASE chamilodb;
CREATE USER 'chamilouser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'Pa$$worD123';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON chamilodb.* TO 'chamilouser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for BlogoText CMS.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘blogotext.conf’ on your virtual server:

touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/blogotext.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/blogotext.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/blogotext.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/blogotext.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin [email protected]
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/blogotext
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/blogotext/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common

Save and close the file. Restart the apache service for the changes to take effects:

a2ensite blogotext.conf
a2enmod rewrite
systemctl restart apache2

BlogoText will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/ or http://server-ip/ and complete the required the steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

blogotext-install

Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed BlogoText CMS. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing BlogoText content management system on your Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official BlogoText web site.

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