Installing Fork CMS on Fedora 28

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Fork is an open source CMS written in PHP. Fork's source code is hosted on GitHub. This guide will show you how to install Fork CMS on a fresh Fedora 28 Vultr instance.

Requirements

• PHP 7.1 or higher.
• MySQL 5.0 or higher.
• Nginx or Apache 2.0 with .htaccess, mod rewrite, mod expires (optional but recommended) and mod deflate (optional) enabled.

Before you begin

Check the Fedora version.

cat /etc/fedora-release
# Fedora release 28 (Twenty Eight)

Create a new non-root user account with sudo access and switch to it. Replace johndoe with your username.

useradd -c "John Doe" johndoe && passwd johndoe
usermod -aG wheel johndoe
su - johndoe

Set up the timezone.

timedatectl list-timezones
sudo timedatectl set-timezone 'Region/City'

Ensure that your system is up to date.

sudo dnf check-upgrade || sudo dnf upgrade -y

Install required and useful packages.

sudo dnf install -y wget vim unzip bash-completion

For simplicity, disable SELinux and Firewall.

sudo setenforce 0
sudo systemctl stop firewalld
sudo systemctl disable firewalld

Step 1 - Install PHP, required PHP extensions, Nginx and MySQL

Download and install PHP and required PHP extensions.

sudo dnf install -y php-cli php-fpm php-common php-mbstring php-gd php-intl php-mysqlnd php-xml php-json

Check the PHP version.

php --version
# PHP 7.2.6 (cli) (built: May 22 2018 16:22:08) ( NTS )
# Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
# Zend Engine v3.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies

Install Nginx.

sudo dnf install -y nginx

Check the Nginx version.

nginx -v
# nginx version: nginx/1.12.1

Start and enable Nginx.

sudo systemctl enable nginx.service
sudo systemctl start nginx.service

Install MariaDB.

sudo dnf install -y mariadb-server

Check the MariaDB version.

mysql --version
# mysql  Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.2.15-MariaDB, for Linux (x86_64) using readline 5.1

Start and enable MariaDB.

sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service
sudo systemctl start mariadb.service

Run the mysql_secure_installation script to improve the security of your MariaDB installation.

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Log into MariaDB as the root user.

mysql -u root -p
# Enter password:

Create a new MariaDB database and user, and remember the credentials.

create database dbname;
grant all on dbname.* to 'username' identified by 'password';

Exit MySQL.

exit

Step 2 - Configure Nginx

Run sudo vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/fork.conf and populate it with the following.

server {
  listen 80;

  root /var/www/fork;
  index index.php index.html;

  server_name example.com;

  location / {
    # Checks whether the requested url exists as a file $uri or directory $uri/ in the root, else redirect to /index.php.
    try_files $uri $uri/ @redirects;
  }

  location @redirects {
    rewrite ^ /index.php;
  }

  location ~ \.php$ {
    try_files $uri =404;
    include fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php-fpm/www.sock; # Make sure to doublecheck this!
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_read_timeout 60;
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
  }

  # Don't pollute the logs with common requests
  location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
  location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

  # As Fork CMS has the app_root as doc_root, we need to restrict access to a few things for security purposes!
  location ~* ^/(composer\..*|vendor\/.*|Procfile$|\.git\/.*|src\/Console.*|.*\.gitignore|\.editorconfig|\.travis.yml|autoload\.php|bower\.json|phpunit\.xml\.dist|.*\.md|app\/logs\/.*|app\/config\/.*|src\/Frontend\/Cache\/CompiledTemplates.*|src\/Frontend\/Cache\/Locale\/.*\.php|src\/Frontend\/Cache\/Navigation\/.*\.php|src\/Frontend\/Cache\/Search\/.*|src\/Backend\/Cache\/CompiledTemplates\/.*|src\/Backend\/Cache\/Locale\/.*\.php)$ {
    deny all;
    access_log off;
    log_not_found off;
  }

  # Deny access to dot-files.
  location ~ /\. {
    deny all;
    access_log off;
    log_not_found off;
  }
}

A summary of the changes that you will be making are as follows.

• Change the value of the root directive to point to the correct location of your website, such as /var/www/fork.
• Change the value of the server_name directive to point to your domain name or IP address.
• Make sure you check if fastcgi_pass is set correctly.

Test the Nginx configuration.

sudo nginx -t

Reload Nginx.

sudo systemctl reload nginx.service

Step 3 - Download and install Composer

Download Composer dependencies.

sudo dnf install -y curl git unzip

Download and install Composer, the dependency manager for PHP.

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '544e09ee996cdf60ece3804abc52599c22b1f40f4323403c44d44fdfdd586475ca9813a858088ffbc1f233e9b180f061') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Check the Composer version.

composer --version
# Composer version 1.6.5 2018-05-04 11:44:59

Step 4 - Download and install Fork CMS via Composer

Create a document root directory.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/fork

Change ownership of the /var/www/fork directory to johndoe.

sudo chown -R johndoe:johndoe /var/www/fork

Download the latest stable release of Fork CMS from the command line.

cd /var/www/fork
composer create-project forkcms/forkcms .

Change ownership of the /var/www/fork directory to nginx.

sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /var/www/fork

Run sudo vim /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf and set user and group to nginx.

sudo vim /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf
# user = nginx
# group = nginx

Restart php-fpm.service.

sudo systemctl restart php-fpm.service

Edit the app/config/parameters.yml.dist file and set database information.

sudo vim /var/www/fork/app/config/parameters_install.yml

Create /var/lib/php/session directory and change its ownership to user nginx.

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/php/session
sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /var/lib/php/session

Finally, using your preferred web browser, open your site and follow the Fork CMS installer. After following the installer, you will have a Fork instance up and running. To access the Fork admin area just append /private to your site URL.