MyBB, also known as MyBBoard or MyBulletinBoard, is very popular and free forum software developed using PHP and MySQL. With everything from forums to threads, posts to private messages, search to profiles, and reputation to warnings, MyBB features everything you need to run an efficient and captivating community.
Install MyBB on Ubuntu 16.04
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 MyBB on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
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 php7.0-mysql php7.0-curl php7.0-json php7.0-cgi php7.0 libapache2-mod-php7.0 <code>php7.0-mcrypt </code>
Step 3. Installing MyBB.
First thing to do is to go to MyBB’s download page and download the latest stable version of MyBB, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.8.7:
wget https://resources.mybb.com/downloads/mybb_1807.zip
Unpack the MyBB archive to the document root directory on your server:
unzip mybb_1807.zip -d /var/www/html
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/html/mybb/
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for MyBB.
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 MyBB. 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 MyBB installation:
MariaDB [(none)]> create database mybb; MariaDB [(none)]> grant all privileges on mybb.* to mybbuser@localhost identified by 'your_password'; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; MariaDB [(none)]> \q
Step 4. Configuring Apache web server for MyBB.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘mybb.conf’ on your virtual server:
sudo a2enmod rewrite touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/mybb.conf ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/mybb.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/mybb.conf nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/mybb.conf
Add the following lines:
ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mybb/ ServerName your-domain.com ServerAlias www.your-domain.com 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
Next, rename the config.default.php file in the inc directory to config.php since you will be asked to do this later during the MyBB installation via browser. Execute the following:
mv inc/config.default.php inc/config.php
Now, we can restart Apache web server so that the changes take place:
systemctl restart apache2.service
Step 5. Accessing MyBB.
MyBB 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 MyBB. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing MyBB in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official MyBB web site.