How to install Elxis CMS on CentOS 7

Elxis is powerful open source content management system (CMS ) it is free for use under the GNU/GPL license. This CMS is modern, flexible, easy to use and it comes with many useful multi-lingual features, such as:

• Responsive design
• Built-in commentary system
• Multi-level menus
• Image galleries
• Contact Forms
• Visitors native language detection
• WYSIWYG editor
• Built-in cron jobs
• Performance monitor
• And many more…

Elxis can be installed and run on a wide range of platforms and operating systems with a web server (Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd), PHP version 5.2 or newer and an SQL server like MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL. In today’s article we will guide you through the installation of Elxis CMS on a CentOS 7 VPS with Apache, PHP and MariaDB.

The installation is pretty easy and fast. Log in to your CentOS 7 server as user root

ssh root@IP

and update all installed packages by executing the following command

yum -y update

Next, install Apache web server

yum -y install httpd

Once the installation is completed, start the web server and set it to start automatically on system start up

systemctl start httpd
systemctl enable httpd

Elxis is a PHP based application, so we need to install PHP with the PDO and GD modules

yum -y install php php-pdo php-gd

Install MariaDB server on your VPS using the following command

yum -y install mariadb mariadb-server

Once the installation is completed start the database server and set it to start on start up

systemctl start mariadb
systemctl enable mariadb

Then, run the mysql_secure_installation script to secure the database server and set your MariaDB root password.

Login to the MariaDB server with the root user and create a blank database which will be used by Elxis to store the data.

mysql -u root -p

CREATE DATABASE elxis;
CREATE USER 'elxisuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `elxis`.* TO 'elxisuser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

Don’t forget to replace ‘PASSWORD’ with an actual strong password.

Download the latest version of Elxis CMS from their official website and upload it to your server via FTP or sFTP. Once it is uploaded, unpack the Elxis ZIP archive to the document root directory of your server

mkdir /var/www/html/elxis
unzip elxis_4.3_proteas_rev1716.zip -d /var/www/html/elxis

Elxis uses a directory named ‘repository’ to store cached pages, log files, sessions, backups and more. It is recommended to rename this directory and move it in a place not reachable from the web.

mv /var/www/html/elxis/repository /var/www/data

Set the Apache user to be owner of the Elxis files and directories

chown -R apache: /var/www/html/elxis/
chown -R apache: /var/www/repository

Now, create Apache virtual host for your Elxis based website. Create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file with the following content:

IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf

Create a ‘vhosts.d/’ directory

mkdir /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/

and create the virtual host with the following content

vim /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/yourdomain.com.conf

<VirtualHost YOUR_SERVER_IP:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/elxis/"
ServerName yourdomain.com
ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com
ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log"
CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined

<Directory "/var/www/html/elxis/">
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Save the file and restart the Apache web server for the changes to take effect.

systemctl restart httpd

With this step the installation from the command line is completed. Now, open a web browser and navigate it to http://yourdomain.com and follow the on-screen installation process to complete the Elxis CMS installation.

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

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