How to Install Trident on an Ubuntu 14.04 VPS

trident vpsIn this tutorial we are going to provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to install Trident on an Ubuntu VPS.
Trident is one of the best open source social content management platforms. It is used to create responsive, highly customizable and easy to manage social network websites.

This install guide assumes that Apache, MySQL and PHP are already installed and configured on your server. At the time of this writing, the latest version of Trident is 8.0.

Download the latest version of Trident available at ‘http://www.online.me/page/download’ to the server and extract it using the following commands:

cd /opt 
wget http://ci.boonex.com/builds/Trident-v.8.0.0-B2.zip
unzip Trident-v.8.0.0-B2.zip

Create a new MySQL database for Trident to use and assign a user to it with full permissions:

mysql -u root -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE tridentdb;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON tridentdb.* TO 'tridentuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit

Note: Change ‘your-password’ with a strong password (with at least 8 characters that includes a combination of mixed case letters and numbers and special characters).
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘trident.conf’ on your virtual server:

touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/trident.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/trident.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/trident.conf
vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/trident.conf

then, add the following lines to it:

<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
 DocumentRoot /var/www/html/trident/
 ServerName yourdomain.com
 ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com
 <Directory /var/www/html/trident/>
 Options FollowSymLinks
 AllowOverride All
 </Directory>
 ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/yourdomain.com-error_log
 CustomLog /var/log/apache2/yourdomain.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

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

service apache2 restart

Move the Trident installation files to the document root directory defined in the virtual host directive above:

mv /opt/Trident-v.8.0.0-B2/ /var/www/html/trident

Also, the web server user (www-data) needs to be able to write to ‘inc’, ‘cache’, ‘cache_public’, ‘logs’, ‘tmp’ and ‘storage’ directories so it can easily be accomplished by running the following command:

chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html/trident/

Change the permissions of ‘ffmpeg.exe’ file:

chmod 755 /var/www/html/trident/plugins/ffmpeg/ffmpeg.exe

Open your favorite web browser and navigate to your domain (i.e. http://yourdomain.com). Once you do that, you will be taken to the first screen of the Trident web installer. On the first step of the installation process, you need to add the necessary information about your Trident website paths, then enter database information:

Database host name: localhost
Database host port number: 3306
Database name: tridentdb
Database user: tridentuser
Database password:your-password

Enter the site info, create a new administrator account and click ‘Submit’.

Setup a new cron job. For example, run the following command:

crontab -e

and add the following lines:

MAILTO=your@emailaddress.com
* * * * * /usr/bin/php -q /var/www/html/trident/periodic/cron.php

Do not forget to change ‘your@emailaddress.com’ with your actual email address, then run:

service cron restart

After finishing the installation it is strongly recommended to delete all files and subdirectories from the install directory located to your Trident document root as a security precaution, so run the following command:

rm -rf /var/www/html/trident/install/

That is it. The Trident installation is now complete. Log in to the Administrator back-end area at http://yourdomain.com/studio to configure Trident according to your needs, add additional modules etc. and start building your Social Network website.

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

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