Install Zenario with Apache, PHP and MariaDB on CentOS 7

wKgRyysBZenario is free and open source, multi-lingual content management system (CMS) designed for creating simple or complex blogs, news items, events and other content types.

In this article we will install Zenario on a CentOS 7 VPS with Apache, PHP and MariaDB.

To run Zenario on your server you have to install the following requirements

  • Apache Server version 2
  • PHP version 5.3 or later
  • MySQL version 5.0 or later
  • An empty MySQL database to install to
  • The GD, libCurl, libJPEG and libPNG libraries, and multibyte support in PHP
  • Apache mod_rewrite support for .htaccess files (optional but highly recommended)

Log in to your server via SSH as user root

ssh root@IP

and run the following command to update all packages on your server

yum -y update

Zenario needs an SQL database to store the information. Run the following command to install MariaDB database server

yum install mariadb mariadb-server

Start the MariaDB database server and enable it to start at the boot time

systemctl start mariadb
systemctl enable mariadb

In order to secure MariaDB and set the MariaDB root password we will run the ‘mysql_secure_installation’ script.

Now, log in to the MariaDB server using the ‘root’ user and create new database end user.

mysql -u root -p

CREATE DATABASE zenario;
CREATE USER 'zenariouser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `zenario`.* TO 'zenariouser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Do not forget to replace ‘PASSWORD’ with an actual strong password.

Next, we will install Apache web server

yum install httpd

Same as we did with MariaDB, start the Apache web server and add it to automatically start on the system start-up

systemctl start httpd
systemctl enable httpd

Execute the following command to install PHP among with few PHP modules

yum install php php-gd php-common

Go to Zenario’s official website and download the latest stable release of the software. At the moment of writing this article it is version 7.0.6.

wget http://zenar.io/public/downloads/XBE3u/zenario-probusiness-7.0.6b.zip

Unpack the zip archive in the document root directory of your server

unzip zenario-probusiness-7.0.6b.zip -d /var/www/html/

Rename the directory

mv zenario-probusiness-7.0.6b/ zenario

All files have to be readable by the web server, so we need to set the proper ownership

chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/zenario

We need to create two directories, ‘backup’ and ‘docstore’ outside of the document root directory.

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GET YOUR VPS
mkdir /var/www/backup
mkdir /var/www/docstore

and change the ownership of the directories

chown apache:apache /var/www/backup
chown apache:apache /var/www/docstore

Next, create Apache virtual host for your domain. Create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ directory with the following content

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

IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf

and create the virtual host

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

<VirtualHost YOUR_SERVER_IP:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/zenario/"
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/zenario/">
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Restart the web server for the changes to take effect.

systemctl restart httpd

Finally, open a web browser and access http://yourdomain.com to run the Zenario installer and finish the installation. More information about Zenario you can find at their official documentation.

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 Zenario for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.

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