Mahara is a fully featured web application to build your electronic portfolio. You can upload files, create journals, embed social media resources from the web and collaborate with other users in groups.
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 Mahara on a Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) server.
Install Mahara 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 Mahara.
First thing to do is to go to Mahara’s download page and download the latest stable version of Mahara, At the moment of writing this article it is version 5:
wget https://launchpad.net/mahara/16.04/16.04.1/+download/mahara-16.04.1.zip
Unpack the Mahara archive to the document root directory on your server:
unzip mahara-16.04.1.zip mv mahara-16.04.1 /var/www/html/mahara
Create Mahara’s upload directory:
mkdir /var/www/html/mahara/upload/
Next, create Mahara’s config.php. In the Mahara ‘htdocs’ directory there is config-dist.php file. Make a copy of this called config.php:
cd /var/www/html/mahara/htdocs/ cp config-dist.php config.php
Add the following lines:
### nano config.php $cfg->dbtype = 'mysql'; $cfg->dbhost = 'localhost'; $cfg->dbport = null; $cfg->dbname = 'mahara'; $cfg->dbuser = 'maharauser'; $cfg->dbpass = 'your-password'; $cfg->dataroot = '/var/www/html/mahara/upload/';
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/mahara/
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Mahara.
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 Mahara. 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 Mahara installation:
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE mahara character set UTF8; MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mahara.* TO 'maharauser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password'; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; MariaDB [(none)]> \q
Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Mahara.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘mahara.conf’ on your virtual server:
sudo a2enmod rewrite touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/mahara.conf ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/mahara.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/mahara.conf nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/mahara.conf
Add the following lines:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/mahara/htdocs/" ServerName your-domain.com ServerAlias www.your-domain.com <Directory "/var/www/html/mahara/htdocs/"> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> 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 Mahara.
Mahara 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 Mahara. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Mahara open source e-commerce on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Mahara web site.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeS1iqQ6VIc]
