How to Install Feng Office on a Debian 9 VPS

by

This guide will walk you through the processing of installing Feng Office on a Debian 9 VPS.

Feng Office is an open-source collaboration platform written in PHP and it comes in three editions: Community, Professional, and Enterprise. We will install the Community edition, which includes features such as task management, document management, workspaces, and a lot more. This guide should work on other Linux VPS systems as well, but it was tested and written for a Debian 9 VPS. Let’s get started with the installation.

Prerequisites:

Here are the system requirements for running Feng Office 3.7 on a Debian 9 VPS:

  • Minimum 2 GB / Recommended 6 GB of RAM memory
  • Minimum 2 / Recommended 4 CPU Cores
  • Disk space depends on the amount of data you are expecting to manage, but a minimum of 10GB is advised.

Step 1: Install the Required packages

Log in to your VPS via SSH as root or as a sudo user:

ssh userame@IP_Address

Remember to replace “IP_Address” with your server’s public IP address. If your server does not use the default SSH port number, add -p Port_Number to the end of the command and replace “Port_Number” with your server’s SSH port number.

Once logged in, issue the following commands to update all installed packages to their latest available versions:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Afterwards, install the required packages using the following command:

sudo apt-get install catdoc xpdf ghostscript imagemagick wkhtmltopdf unzip wget

Step 2: Install LAMP

A LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack is a combination of open source software, typically installed on a server used for hosting dynamic websites and web applications.

First, we will install Apache, the most widely-used web server in the world. It is fast, secure, reliable, and can be easily customized depending on your needs.

To install Apache on your Debian 9 server, type the following command:

sudo apt-get install apache2

Once the installation is complete, enable the Apache service to start automatically upon system boot:

sudo systemctl enable apache2

Next, we will install PHP and the modules needed to run Feng Office:

apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql php-curl php-json php-cgi libapache2-mod-php php-mcrypt php-xmlrpc php-gd php-mbstring php php-common php-xmlrpc php-soap php-xml php-intl php-cli php-ldap php-zip php-readline php-imap php-tidy php-recode php-opcache php-intl php-mbstring

Restart the Apache web server so that the PHP module is loaded:

systemctl restart apache2.service

The last step is to install MariaDB:

sudo apt-get install mariadb-server

Enable the Apache service to start automatically upon system boot:

sudo systemctl enable mariadb

Once the installation is complete, it is recommended to run the following command to improve the security of your MariaDB server:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

When/if the program asks for your MySQL root password, just press the [Enter] key, as there is no password set by default. We suggest answering each prompt with ‘Y’.

Step 3: Configure Apache and PHP

Open the php.ini configuration file with your preferred text editor:

sudo nano /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini

Then make the following changes. First, find and modify the following values:

max_execution_time = 300
max_input_time = 300
memory_limit = 512M
post_max_size = 128M
upload_max_filesize = 128M
display_errors = Off
html_errors = Off
display_startup_errors = Off
log_errors = On
output_buffering = Off

Next, create a new virtual host configuration file so that we can access our Feng Office application with a domain name instead of an IP address.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/domain-name.com.conf

Then add the following content to the file:

ServerAdmin admin@>domain-name.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/fengoffice/
ServerName domain-name.com
ServerAlias www.domain-name.com


    Options FollowSymlinks
    AllowOverride All
    Require all granted


ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

of course, you will need to replace all instances of domain-name.com with your actual registered domain name.

Once you have configured the virtual host, you can enable it by executing the following commands.

sudo a2ensite domain-name.com

Also, make sure that the mod rewrite is enabled:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

Restart Apache for the changes to take effect:

sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 4: Create a Database

We’ll need to create a database in order for Feng Office to have a location where it will store its data. Log in to the MySQL console:

mysql -u root -p

Create a database and user that will be able to interact with the database:

CREATE DATABASE fengdb;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON fengdb.* TO 'fenguser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'strong_password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
quit;

Do not forget to change ‘strong_password‘ with an actual strong password.

Step 5: Install Feng Office

Download the latest version of Feng Office in the /tmp directory:

cd /tmp/ 
wget --no-check-certificate -O fengoffice.zip https://www.fengoffice.com/web/reference.php?dest=latest_version
unzip fengoffice.zip

Move the extracted files to a directory named ‘fengoffice’ and change the ownership so that it belongs to the Apache web server:

mkdir -p /var/www/html/fengoffice/
mv fengoffice-3.* /var/www/html/fengoffice
chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html/fengoffice/

After completing all the steps, open http://domain-name.com in your favorite web browser and start the installation process.

Follow the steps of the web installation and fill out all of the necessary information.

Please note that the ‘core_dimensions‘ plugin is required for this application, so you should install it. You can also select the “workspace” and “mail” plugins during the web installation process.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Feng Office on your server.

Of course, if you are one of our Feng Office Hosting customers, you don’t have to install Feng Office on your Debian 9 VPS – simply ask our admins, sit back, and relax. Our admins will install and configure Feng Office on Debian 9 for you immediately.

PS. If you liked this post on how to install Feng Office on a Debian 9 VPS, or if you found it helpful, please share it with your friends on the social networks using the share buttons below, or simply leave a comment in the comments section. Thanks.

Leave a Comment