In this tutorial we will show you how to install and configuration Pixie on Ubuntu 15.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Pixie is an open source web application that will help you quickly create and maintain your own website. Many people refer to this type of software as a “content management system”, we prefer to call it a small, simple, website maker. Pixie has been designed to be simple to use and easy to develop for.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation Pixie CMS on an Ubuntu 15.04 server.
Install Pixie on Ubuntu 15.04
Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt-get commands in the terminal.
1 2 | sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade |
Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.
A Ubuntu 15.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also install all required PHP modules:
1 | apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mcrypt php5-mysql php5-gd php5-curl |
Step 3. Installing Pixie.
First thing to do is to go to Pixie’s download page and download the latest stable version of Pixie, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.0.4:
1 | wget http://pixie-cms.googlecode.com/files/pixie_v1.04.zip |
Unpack the Pixie archive to the document root directory on your server:
1 2 | unzip pixie_v1.04.zip mv pixie_v1.04/ /var/www/html/pixie/ |
We will need to change some folders permissions:
1 | chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html/pixie |
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Pixie.
By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each steps carefully which will set root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:
1 | mysql_secure_installation |
Configure it like this:
1 2 3 4 5 | - Set root password? [Y/n] y - Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y - Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y - Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y - Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y |
Next we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the Pixie. Run the following command:
1 | mysql -u root -p |
This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Pixie installation:
1 2 3 4 | CREATE DATABASE pixie; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON pixie.* TO 'pixieuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; \q |
Step 4. Configuring Apache web server for Pixie.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘pixie.conf’ on your virtual server:
1 2 3 | touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/pixie.conf ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/pixie.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/pixie.conf nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/pixie.conf |
Add the following lines:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com DocumentRoot /var/www/html/pixie/ ServerName your-domain.com ServerAlias www.your-domain.com <Directory /var/www/html/pixie/> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common </VirtualHost> |
Now, we can restart Apache web server so that the changes take place:
1 | systemctl restart apache2.service |
Step 5. Accessing Pixie.
Pixie will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/ or http://server-ip and complete the required the steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel. Once you finish the installation you can access the admin section at:
1 | http://yourdomain.com/admin.php |
Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed Pixie. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Pixie content management system on your Ubuntu 15.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Pixie web site.
