GrandCMS is a new free, open source CMS based on OpenCart core. An easy to use CMS solution with the ability to create your own websites without any costs. Especially recommend for OpenCart owners. They can use it for primary or secondary site.
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 GrandCMS on a Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) server.
Install GrandCMS on Ubuntu 16.04
Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.
A Ubuntu 16.04 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 php5 php5-mysql php5-gd php5-curl libssh2-php
Step 3. Installing GrandCMS.
First thing to do is to go to GrandCMS’s download page and download the latest stable version of GrandCMS, At the moment of writing this article it is version 0.2.0.1.1.
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/grandcms/grandcms_v0.2.0.1.1.zip
Unpack the GrandCMS archive to the document root directory on your server:
unzip grandcms_v0.2.0.1.1.zip mv upload/ /var/www/html mv /var/www/html/upload /var/www/html/grandcms
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/grandcms
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for GrandCMS.
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 GrandCMS. 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 GrandCMS installation:
CREATE DATABASE grandcms; CREATE USER 'grandcmsuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD'; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `grandcms`.* TO 'grandcmsuser'@'localhost'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; exit
Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for GrandCMS.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘grandcms.conf’ on your virtual server:
sudo a2enmod rewrite touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/grandcms.conf ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/grandcms.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/grandcms.conf nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/grandcms.conf
Add the following lines:
ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/grandcms/" ServerName your-domain.com ServerAlias www.your-domain.com <Directory "/var/www/html/grandcms/"> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common
Now, we can restart Apache web server so that the changes take place:
systemctl restart apache2.service
Step 6. Accessing GrandCMS.
GrandCMS will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.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.
Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed GrandCMS. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing GrandCMS e-commerce on your Ubuntu 16.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official GrandCMS web site.