Install gpEasy CMS with NGINX and PHP5-FPM on an Ubuntu 14.04 VPS

In this article we will show you how to install gpEasy CMS on a Ubuntu 14.04 VPS using Nginx web-server and PHP5-FPM.

gpEasy is a simple and powerful CMS. It was designed to be an easy to use, but lightweight and fully functional content management system (CMS).

gpEasy CMS doesn’t require you to setup any databases and allows you to edit your website on the fly since it’s flat-file based.

Nginx is a lightweight but very powerful web server. It’s known to be ultimately stable and high-performance HTTP server.

PHP5-FPM stands for PHP5 FastCGI Process Manager and it is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites.

We’ll assume that unzip is installed on your Linux VPS. If not, run the following command to install the program:

# apt-get install unzip

REQUIREMENTS

We are using our SSD 1 VPS hosting plan for this tutorial.

UPDATE THE SYSTEM

Login to your server as root and execute the following commands:

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade

INSTALL NGINX AND PHP5-FPM

Now we need to install Nginx and PHP5-FPM:

# apt-get install nginx php5-fpm

For the purpose of this tutorial let’s create a new user who will hold the gpEasy installation in his home directory.

# adduser gpeasy

Finish the steps of user creation and then add the gpeasy user to www-data group to avoid permission errors using the bellow command:

# usermod -a -G www-data gpeasy

Since this command won’t output anything, for your peace of mind you can still perform a check using:

# groups gpeasy | grep www-data

The following step of this installation procedure is to login as the gpeasy user that we created. To do that, execute and enter the password you set up:

# login gpeasy

Once you are logged in, you will notice that you are currently located in the gpeasy user home directory.

INSTALL gpEasy

First, let’s download gpEasy CMS:

# wget -c http://gpeasy.com/Special_gpEasy?cmd=dlzip -O gpeasy.zip

Unzip the downloaded zip file:

# unzip gpeasy.zip

Rename the gpEasy directory to gpEasyCMS to avoid confusion when setting up the Nginx configuration for this content managment system.

# mv gpEasy/ gpEasyCMS/

Next, we need to give the right permissions and change the group on the data directory of gpEasy. This is needed to avoid read/write errors when using gpEasy.

# chmod 775 /home/gpeasy/gpEasyCMS/data
# chgrp www-data /home/gpeasy/gpEasyCMS/data

It is recommended to disable executing of the following files for everyone including owner and the group:

# chmod 664 gpEasyCMS/data/example_htaccess
# chmod 664 gpEasyCMS/data/index.html

Log out from gpeasy user:

# logout

CONFIGURE NGINX

First, remove the default nginx site configuration:

# rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

If you want to point more domains to the server, it might be needed to increase hash bucket size in the Nginx configuration file. To do that, open the file with your favorite text editor. We are using vim for our purposes:

# vim /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Find the ‘# server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;’ line in this file and remove # from the line. Save it and close the file.

Create the site configuration for your gpEasy installation:

# vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/gpeasy

Now, paste the following configuration and replace the ‘yourdomain’ value with your actual existing domain:

If you want to enable image functions for gpEasy run the following command:

# apt-get install php5-gd

Enable the gpEasy website configuration:

# ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/gpeasy /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/gpeasy

Restart Nginx and PHP5-FPM:

# /etc/init.d/php5-fpm restart
# /etc/init.d/nginx restart

Now you can finish your gpEasy installation by opening your favorite web browser and navigate to: http://your_ip_address/gpEasyCMS

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

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