How To Install and Setup Elgg on a Debian or Ubuntu VPS

Introduction

Elgg is an award winning PHP engine for running your own full fledged social network. It has great community support in the form of plugins and themes made by official developers and the user community.

Requirements

1. Debian 7 or Ubuntu 12.04

2. Apache (with rewrite module)

3. PHP 5.2+ (few modules required to support some of the features)

4. MySQL 5+

Installation

It is a good idea to do a total system update before doing anything else.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Installing web and database server

Install apache and mysql first by doing

apt-get install apache2 mysql-server

During the mysql-server installation, you have to input a password for the root user. Using a strong password and noting it down is a good idea, as you will have to use it to create a database and a user for Elgg later.

Configuring apache

After installing apache, the rewrite module that Elgg requires should be enabled by running:

a2enmod rewrite

The default apache configuration ignores .htaccess files in the “document root” (/var/www by default). But this is required for url rewriting in Elgg to work.

Change the apache configuration by opening it in nano, vim, or any editor you like.

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

In this file, replace AllowOverride None with AllowOverride All in the Directory section defined for /var/www folder.

After the configuration file is edited and saved, do an apache server restart:

service apache2 restart

Creating MySQL user and database

It is a good idea to create a new database user instead of using root for Elgg’s purpose. Get into the MySQL command line by running:

mysql -u root -p

Execute the following queries to create a new database, a user for Elgg, and grant the database access to this user.

CREATE DATABASE elgg;
CREATE USER elgguser IDENTIFIED BY 'elggpassword';
GRANT ALL ON elgg.* TO elgguser;

Installing PHP

The following command installs php along with few modules Elgg needs for some of it’s features to work.

apt-get install php5 php5-gd php-xml-parser php5-mysql unzip

Downloading Elgg

Go to your webserver’s root directory and download Elgg’s source code.

cd /var/www/
wget http://elgg.org/getelgg.php?forward=elgg-1.8.18.zip -O elgg.zip

Unzip and remove elgg.zip and unwrap the folder enclosing the code.

unzip elgg.zip && rm elgg.zip
mv elgg-1.8.18/* . && rmdir elgg-1.8.18

Configuring Elgg for Install

Setting up data directory

Elgg uses a data directory to store user uploaded and system generated data. Create a folder outside the webserver’s root directory and make it writeable by the webserver.

mkdir <span style='color: red'>/var/elggdata</span>
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/elggdata

www-data is apache’s user that writes to file system. The above command grants apache ownership of the data directory.

.htaccess and settings.php

Now move the .htaccess file and the settings.php files to their places.

mv /var/www/htaccess_dist /var/www/.htaccess
mv /var/www/engine/settings.example.php /var/www/engine/settings.php

Editing settings.php

Open up the settings.php file and fill in the database access details.

nano /var/www/engine/settings.php

Make sure to set the right values to the following variables in the file.

$CONFIG->dbuser = 'elgguser';

$CONFIG->dbpass = 'elggpassword';

$CONFIG->dbname = 'elgg';

$CONFIG->dbhost = 'localhost';

$CONFIG->dbprefix = ''; // or anything else you like

Installing Elgg

If you followed all the steps in this article, the install will be a breeze for you. Open up the browser and navigate to /install.php of your website(‘example.com’, etc.) or your ip address (‘128.199.246.37’, etc.).

http://example.com/install.php
or
http://128.199.246.37/install.php

That’s it! You should see the installation page with instructions about various steps involved in the process. Elgg will create the database and ask for few site specific details and even creates the admin user for you in the subsequent steps.

Getting Help

Elgg has great community support. If you are stuck anywhere just head over to the community site. There are quite a few people ready to help you with anything you may need.

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