How to install Wolf CMS on a CentOS VPS

by

200px-Wolf_logo_250Wolf CMS is free and open-source, PHP based content management system that offers simple and elegant user interface. Wolf CMS is a fork of Frog CMS. In order to run Wolf CMS on your server you need to have a web server, PHP5 and MySQL or SQLite 3 database server installed. In this tutorial we will install Wolf CMS on a CentOS 7 VPS with Apache, PHP and MariaDB.

Af the very beginning we need to make sure that all packages installed on the server are up to date

yum -y update

Wolf CMS depends on a database, so we will install MariaDB server

yum install mariadb mariadb-server

Start the MariaDB database server and enable the service at boot time

systemctl start mariadb
systemctl enable mariadb

Run the ‘mysql_secure_installation’ post installation script which removes the test database and secures MariaDB. It will also prompt you to set your MariaDB root password.

Log in to the MariaDB server using the ‘root’ user and create new user and database with Unicode collation type

mysql -u root -p
CREATE DATABASE wolfcms CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
CREATE USER 'wolfcmsuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `wolfcms`.* TO 'wolfcmsuser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Next, we will install Apache web server, start it and add it to automatically start on the system start-up

yum install httpd
systemctl start httpd
systemctl enable httpd

Install PHP and with PHP modules

yum install php php-mysql php-common

Download the latest stable version of Wolf CMS from their official website.

wget https://bitbucket.org/wolfcms/wolf-cms-downloads/downloads/wolfcms-0.8.2.zip

Unpack the zip archive to the document root directory on your server

unzip wolfcms-0.8.2.zip -d /var/www/html/

The archive will be unpacked in a new ‘wolfcms’ directory. Change your current working directory and change the owner of the directory

cd /var/www/html/wolfcms
chown -R apache:apache wolfcms

In order to use clean URLs we will rename activate the .htaccess file by renaming it

mv _.htaccess .htaccess

If it is not already turned off, it is recommended to turn off magic_quotes_gpc because this feature is deprecated. To do this we need to edit PHP’s configuation file and make sure that the following line is set to off

magic_quotes_gpc = Off

We can find the loaded PHP configating file by executing

php --ini
Configuration File (php.ini) Path: /etc
Loaded Configuration File:         /etc/php.ini

In order to access Wolf CMS using your domain name, you need to create Apache virtual host. Create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ directory with the following content

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

IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf

Create the virtual host

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

<VirtualHost YOUR_SERVER_IP:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.tld
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/wolfcms"
ServerName yourdomain.tld
ServerAlias www.yourdomain.tld
ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.tld-error_log"
CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.tld-access_log" combined

<Directory "/var/www/html/wolfcms/">
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

and restart Apache for the changes to take effect.

systemctl restart httpd

Finally, open you favorite web browser, navigate to http://yourdomain.tld/  and follow the steps of the setup wizard to complete the installation.

After the setup is completed, delete the /install and /docs directories and remove the write permissions for the config.php file.

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

PS. If you liked this post please share it with your friends on the social networks using the buttons on the left or simply leave a reply below. Thanks.

Leave a Comment