How To Install Monstra on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Monstra is a modern and lightweight content management system written in PHP. Monstra is the best CMS to manage a small-business website. Monstra provides amazing api’s for plugins, themes and core developers.

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 Monstra on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
Install Monstra on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

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 and 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 php7.0-readline php7.0-curl php7.0-gd php7.0-mbstring libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-bz2 php7.0-zip

Step 3. Installing Monstra.

First thing to do is to go to Monstra’s download page and download the latest stable version of Monstra, At the moment of writing this article it is version 3.0.4:

wget https://bitbucket.org/Awilum/monstra/downloads/monstra-3.0.4.zip

Unpack the Monstra archive to the document root directory on your server:
unzip monstra-3.0.4.zip

mv monstra-3.0.4 /var/www/html/monstra

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/monstra

Step 4. Configuring Apache web server for Monstra.

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

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

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin [email protected]
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/monstra
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/monstra>
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:

systemctl restart apache2

Step 5. Accessing Monstra.

Monstra will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/install.php or http://server-ipinstall.php 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 Monstra. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Monstra content management system on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Monstra web site.

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