How To Install Gogs on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Install Gogs on Ubuntu 16

Gogs is a free and open source self-hosted Git service written in the Go programming language. It is very similar to GitLab and aims to be the easiest and most painless way to set up self-hosted Git service in your development environment.

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 Gogs on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus server.
Install Gogs 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-curl php7.0-gd php7.0-mbstring php7.0-mysql libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-zip

Step 3. Installing Gogs.

First thing to do is to go to Gogs’s download page and download the latest stable version of Gogs, At the moment of writing this article it is version 0.11.4:

cd /opt && wget https://dl.gogs.io/0.11.4/linux_amd64.zip

Unpack the Gogs archive to the document root directory on your server:

unzip linux_amd64.zip
mv gogs/ /var/www/html/gogs

Next, change the directory to the gogs and run the following command to start gogs:

cd /var/www/html/gogs
./gogs web &

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Gogs.

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 Gogs. 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 Gogs installation:

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE gogs;
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON gogs.* TO 'gogs'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your_gogs_password';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> \q

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Gogs.

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

sudo a2enmod rewrite
touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/gogs.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/gogs.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/gogs.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/gogs.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin [email protected]
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/gogs/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/gogs/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass / http://192.168.77.20:3000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.77.20:3000/
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Now, we can restart Apache web server so that the changes take place:

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Accessing Gogs.

Gogs will be available on HTTP port 80 and 3000 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.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Gogs. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Gogs in Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Gogs web site.