How to install Pixie on Ubuntu 14.04

pixie_logo_largePixie is an open-source web application, based on PHP and MySQL that will help you quickly create your own website. Pixie has been designed to be simple to use and easy to develop for. It is fairly easy to install Pixie on an Ubuntu 14.04 VPS. The installation process should take about 5-10 minutes if you follow the very easy steps described below.

At the time of writing this tutorial, Pixie 1.0.4 is the latest stable version available and it requires:

– Apache web server.
– PHP (version 5.2.3 or higher).
– MySQL(version 4.1 or higher) installed on your Linux VPS.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Login to your VPS via SSH

ssh user@server_IP

Update the system

[user]$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade

Install MariaDB 10.0

To install MariaDB, run the following command:

[user]$ sudo apt-get install -y mariadb-server

Next, we need to create a database for the Pixie installation.

[user]$ mysql -u root -p

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE pixie;
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON pixie.* TO 'pixieuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> \q

Do not forget to replace ‘your-password’ with a strong password.

Install Apache2 web server

[user]$ sudo apt-get install apache2

Install PHP and required PHP modules

To install the latest stable version of PHP version 5 and all necessary modules, run:

[user]$ sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mcrypt php5-mysql php5-gd php5-curl

Download and extract the latest version of Pixie on your server:

[user]$ sudo cd /opt && wget http://pixie-cms.googlecode.com/files/pixie_v1.04.zip
[user]$ sudo unzip pixie_v1.04.zip
[user]$ sudo mv pixie_v1.04/ /var/www/html/pixie/

All files have to be readable by the web server, so we need to set the proper ownership:

[user]$ sudo chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html/pixie

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

[user]$ sudo touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/pixie.conf
[user]$ sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/pixie.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/pixie.conf
[user]$ sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/pixie.conf

Then, add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/pixie/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/pixie/>
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>

Restart the Apache web server for the changes to take effect:

[user]$ sudo service apache2 restart

Open http://your-domain.com/ using a web browser and enter your MySQL database username, MySQL database password and MySQL database name and click the ‘Next’ button. On the second step you should choose the language, site url, site name and site type. On the last page, you should create the ‘Super User’ account for Pixie.

That is it. The Pixie installation is now complete. You can access the admin section at:

http://yourdomain.com/admin

For security reasons, it is recommended to delete the ‘/var/www/html/pixie/admin/install/’ directory once you are done with the installation process.

Of course you don’t have to do any of this if you use one of our Linux VPS Hosting services, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to install Pixie for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.

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