Install Habari on a CentOS 7 VPS

Habari is a free and open source publishing platform and application framework with a modular, object-oriented Core. In this guide we will install Habari on a CentOS 7 VPS with Apache, MariaDB and PHP. Its installation is pretty easy and straightforward.

To start the installation of Habari, log in to your server as user root:

ssh root@IP

and as usual, run the following command to make sure that all packages on your CentOS 7 VPS are up to date:

yum -y update

Now, we will install Apache web server:

yum install httpd

Once it is installed, start Apache and set it to start on system start up:

systemctl start httpd
systemctl enable httpd

Habari is PHP based application, so we will install PHP among with few PHP modules required by the application:

yum -y install php php-pdo php-common php-mbstring php-gd php-mysql

Habari requires already created empty database. It supports multiple database backends but in this tutorial we will install and use MariaDB. Run the following commands to install MariaDB on your server:

yum install mariadb mariadb-server

Start the MariaDB server and enable it to start on system start up:

systemctl start mariadb
systemctl enable mariadb

Run the mysql_secure_installation script to secure the database server and set your MariaDB root password.

Now, log in to the MariaDB server  using user ‘root’  and create new database and user for Habari:

mysql -u root -p

CREATE DATABASE habari;
CREATE USER 'habariuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `habari`.* TO 'habariuser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

Don’t forget to replace ‘PASSWORD’ with an actual strong password.

Go to Habari’s official website and download the latest stable version of the application. At the moment of writing this article it is version 0.9.2.

wget http://habariproject.org/dist/habari-0.9.2.zip

Create a directory for Habari’s installation and unpack the zip arhive to the document root directory on your server:

mkdir -p /var/www/html/habari
yum -y install unzip
unzip habari-0.9.2.zip -d /var/www/html/habari/

Change the ownership of the ‘/var/www/html/habari/’ directory:

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

Create Apache virtual host for your website. First create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file 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/habari/"
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/habari/">
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

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

systemctl restart httpd<p/re>

Now, open your favorite web browser and point it to http://yourdomain.com to run the web installer. You will have to choose your database type and enter the necessary information to complete the installation.