In today’s blog article we will focus on the installation and configuration of another forum software – Phorum on a CentOS VPS. The name coming from the combination of ‘PHP’ and ‘forum’. Phorum is free and open-source web based forum software written in PHP. It is very feature rich and easy customizable message board. Its flexibility gives you power to make Phorum do what you want it to do.
Phorum has few requirements and its installation and configuration is very easy. At the very beginning make sure that your CentOS VPS meets the requirements:
- Apache web server
- PHP version 5 or above.
- MySQL server version 5 or above
and update your system:
# yum update -y
Download the latest stable distribution of Phorum from their official website. At the moment of writing this article it is version 5.2.19:
# wget http://www.phorum.org/downloads/phorum-5.2.19.zip
Unzip the downloaded zip archive to your document root directory:
# unzip phorum-5.2.19.zip -d /var/www/html
This will create ‘phorum-5.2.19‘ directory under your document root. We will rename this directory to something simpler, like ‘phorum’:
# mv /var/www/html/phorum-5.2.19/ /var/www/html/phorum
Change your current working directory to Phorum’s directory:
# cd /var/www/html/phorum
Phorum stores its data in a MySQL database, so let’s create a new MySQL database and user:
# echo "CREATE DATABASE phorum;" | mysql -u root -p # echo "CREATE USER 'phorumuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'YOUR_PASSWORD';" | mysql -u root -p # echo "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON phorum.* TO 'phorumuser'@'localhost';" | mysql -u root -p # echo "FLUSH PRIVILEGES;" | mysql -u root -p
* Change ‘YOUR_PASSWORD’ with strong password
Next thing we need to do is to configure Phorum to access the newly created database.
Copy the ‘include/db/config.php.sample‘ file to ‘include/db/config.php‘
# cp include/db/config.php.sample include/db/config.php
and using a text editor edit the file and enter the information for the MySQL database we’ve created:
// Database connection. See the end of this file for a detailed // description of the configuration options. 'type' => 'mysql', 'name' => 'phorum', 'server' => 'localhost', 'user' => 'phorumuser', 'password' => 'YOUR_PASSWORD', 'table_prefix' => 'phorum', 'port' => '3306', 'socket' => NULL,
Now, using your favorite web browser open Phorum’s admin interface at http://DOMAIN.TLD/phorum/admin.php and follow the on-screen instructions. With this step, the installation and configuration on your CentOS VPS is completed and Phorum is ready to use.
Of course, if you are one of our Linux VPS Hosting customers, you don’t have to do any of this, simply ask our admins, sit back and relax. Our admins will set this up for you immediately.
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