Are you looking for a great alternative to Webmin, Kloxo and VestaCP? Well, search no more because Ajenti is an excellent, lightweight and powerful web-based server administration panel. It is a very intuitive, multilingual free control panel that manages almost every aspect of your server.
Ajenti provides a fast and responsive web interface for managing your server, whether you have a Linux VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a Dedicated server. It is built with many pre-made plugins for configuring and monitoring server software and services. To mention few: Apache, Cron, File System, Firewall, MySQL, FTP and many other tools like File Manager, Code Editor for developers and Terminal access.
You will barely need to login to a command line interface either using Putty or Terminal if you have this control panel installed on your server.
Ajenti is just like Webmin because it provides only features to manage your server. It doesn’t come bundled with a ready-to-use LAMP stack. For that purpose, you will need to install Ajenti V, a plugin suite for the core Ajenti, which adds fast, efficient, and easy-to-setup web hosting capabilities by installing pro stack: Nginx as a web server, PHP-fpm, MySQL, Exim 4, and Courier IMAP, etc. We will cover that as well in this tutorial.
Ajenti is written in Python, running as its own process and web server. It defaults to TCP port 8000 for communicating and is configured to use SSL with an automatically generated self-signed SSL certificate by default.
In this guide, we will use CentOS 6.5 VPS.
Login to your server as user ‘root’ :
# ssh root@hostname
Update your CentOS 6.5 VPS using the yum package manager.
# yum update -y # yum upgrade -y
We need to enable EPEL repo because Ajenti package is not available by default.
Enter the following commands:
# wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm # rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
Done. We added the EPEL repo on our server.
Next, we need to download and install Ajenti’s official repository by using the following commands:
# wget http://repo.ajenti.org/ajenti-repo-1.0-1.noarch.rpm # rpm -i ajenti-repo-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
Now, let’s install Ajenti Control Panel.
# yum install ajenti -y # service ajenti restart
Done, we have installed Ajenti.
But since we also want to have Nginx, PHP-fpm, Exim, etc… we need to install the Ajenti V plugin suite.
Ajenti V comes in the form of small packages.
Currently available packages include:
ajenti-v (main package) ajenti-v-mail (Exim and Courier mail) ajenti-v-mysql (MySQL DB support) ajenti-v-php-fpm (PHP support via PHP-FPM) ajenti-v-ruby-unicorn (Rails support via Unicorn) ajenti-v-ruby-puma (Rails support via Puma) ajenti-v-ftp-pureftpd (FTP support via PureFTPd) ajenti-v-nginx (NGINX webserver support) ajenti-v-python-gunicorn (Python WSGI support via gunicorn) ajenti-v-nodejs (Node.js support)
If you have Apache or Postfix/Sendmail installed, and you don’t use them, remove them first.
# yum remove httpd postfix sendmail
Install Ajenti-V with the packages according to your needs.
# yum install ajenti-v ajenti-v-nginx ajenti-v-mail ajenti-v-mysql ajenti-v-php-fpm php-mysql
Common issues:
If you get a ‘[Errno -1] Package does not match the intended download’ error, you will need to clean the metadata.
# yum clean metadata
Then proceed with the installation.
# yum install ajenti-v ajenti-v-nginx ajenti-v-mail ajenti-v-mysql ajenti-v-php-fpm php-mysql
Usually, CentOS blocks port 8000 with a firewall. Run the following to unblock the port temporarily.
# iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 8000 -j ACCEPT
We have successfully installed the Ajenti control panel with its plugin suite Ajenti-V.
The Ajenti control panel will be available on HTTPS port 8000 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to https://yourdomain.com:8000 or https://server-ip:8000.
The default username is root, and the password is admin.
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 Ajenti for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.
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