Cockpit is a web-based system administration service used to manage server services, server storage, configure networks, inspect logs, update server OS packages, and much more. Thanks to its web-based management, keeping track of what’s going on with your server is easier than ever. Cockpit also makes it easier for users that don’t have much experience with servers to better manage their systems without having to learn to use the command line. Let’s begin with the installation.

Requirements

• An Ubuntu 18.04 Server
• Access to the root user account (or access to an admin account with root privileges)

Step 1. Log in to the Server & Update all Server OS Packages

Log in to your Ubuntu 18.04 server via SSH as the root user:

ssh root@IP_Address -p Port_number

You will need to replace ‘IP_Address‘ and ‘Port_number‘ with your server’s respective IP address and SSH port number (if using a custom port number). Additionally, replace ‘root’ with the username of the admin account if necessary.

Before we can start with the Cockpit installation, we have to make sure that all Ubuntu OS packages installed on the server are up to date. We can do this by running the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install Cockpit

Run the following command to install the latest version of Cockpit available in the official Ubuntu repositories:

sudo apt-get install cockpit

In order to access Cockpit only by using your domain name, e.g.  https://your-domain.com, and without the port number 9090 in the URL, we need to install a web server, an SSL certificate on that domain and set Cockpit behind a reverse proxy. Don’t worry, we’ll be covering those steps in this tutorial as well.

Step 3. Install Apache

Check if Apache is already installed and running on the server:

dpkg -l | grep -i apache2
ps aux | grep apache2

If it is not installed, run the following command to install the Apache web server:

apt-get install apache2

Enable Apache service to start automatically upon server boot with:

systemctl enable apache2

We can also check the status of the Apache service with the following command. It should already be running, but let’s check:

systemctl status apache2

The output should look something like this:

● apache2.service – The Apache HTTP Server
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/apache2.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/apache2.service.d
└─apache2-systemd.conf
Active: active (running) since Sun 2019-06-30 11:12:05 CDT; 9min ago
Main PID: 9277 (apache2)
Tasks: 7 (limit: 2321)
CGroup: /system.slice/apache2.service
├─ 9277 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
├─ 9280 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
├─ 9281 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
├─ 9282 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
├─ 9283 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
├─ 9284 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
└─22386 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

Step 4. Install a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate

Install Certbot, a program that automates SSL/TLS certificate installation using Let’s Encrypt Free SSL. This allows your website to be secure for free. Run this command to install the necessary packages for Let’s Encrypt:

sudo apt-get install certbot python-certbot-apache

Install a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate on your domain. Certbot will automatically configure your Apache config file to use SSL:

sudo certbot --apache -d your-domain.com -d www.your-domain.com

Make sure to enter a valid e-mail address as that is where notifications about your certificate status (e.g. an expiring certificate) will arrive. During the installation, choose to redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS.

Step 5. Set a Reverse Proxy in Apache

We can now set a reverse proxy in Apache. In order to do so, we need to enable some additional proxy modules in Apache. Run the following commands:

a2enmod proxy
a2enmod proxy_http
a2enmod proxy_wstunnel

Restart Apache for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart apache2

Once mod_proxy, mod_proxy_http and proxy_wstunnel are enabled in Apache, create a new configuration file for your domain with the following command:
NOTE: It’s very important you replace “your-domain.com” at ALL locations where it shows up in the config file and all other locations. If you don’t, your configuration may not work.

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/your-domain.com.conf

And enter the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =www.your-domain.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =your-domain.com
RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=permanent]
</VirtualHost>

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>

<VirtualHost *:443>

ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com

ProxyRequests Off
<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Upgrade} =websocket [NC]
RewriteRule /(.*) ws://127.0.0.1:9090/$1 [P,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Upgrade} !=websocket [NC]
RewriteRule /(.*) http://127.0.0.1:9090/$1 [P,L]

ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:9090/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:9090/
<Location />
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Location>

SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/your-domain.com/fullchain.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/your-domain.com/privkey.pem
Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf

</VirtualHost>

</IfModule>

Remember to replace your ‘your-domain.com‘ with your actual domain name. Save the file, close it and disable the default Apache configuration:

a2dissite 000-default

Enable the “your-domain.com.conf” configuration in Apache using:

a2ensite your-domain.com

Optionally, we can use this command to enable it:

ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/your-domain.com.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/your-domain.com.conf

Then restart Apache for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart apache2

Edit the Cockpit configuration file and add the following lines:

[WebService]
Origins = https://your-domain.com http://127.0.0.1:9090
ProtocolHeader = X-Forwarded-Proto
AllowUnencrypted = true

Restart Cockpit and enable it to start on server boot:

sudo systemctl restart cockpit.socket
sudo systemctl enable cockpit.socket

Now we can access Cockpit without needing to use port 9090 in a web browser – we can now access it using https://your-domain.com.

Log in as root, or use an existing system user account on the server.

If there are no user accounts created on the server yet, we can create it using this command:

adduser username

Replace username with the actual name of the new user account, and you will be prompted to set and confirm the new user account password. Make sure to use a strong password for the new account.

That’s it – you now have a working Cockpit installation running on your Ubuntu 18.04 server.

Of course, you don’t have to install Cockpit on Ubuntu 18.04, if you use one of our Managed Ubuntu Support solutions, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to setup Cockpit on Ubuntu 18.04 for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.

PS. If you liked this post on how to install Cockpit on an Ubuntu 18.04 VPS, please share it with your friends on the social networks using the share buttons below, or simply leave a comment down in the comments section. Thanks.

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Cockpit is a free, open source and self-hosted content management system (CMS) application written in PHP. It is a simple content platform used by web developers to create and manage any structured content. Cockpit stores the data in an SQLite database, so you don’t need to install or configure a database server such as MySQL / MariaDB. All of this combined makes for a pleasant CMS experience that allows you to share your ideas and content with the world without needing almost any technical knowledge whatsoever.

Let’s get started with the installation.

Prerequisites

• A CentOS 7 VPS with root access enabled (or access to a user account with sudo privileges).
• Apache web server 2.0 or higher compiled with the mod_rewrite Apache module. Alternatively, we can use Nginx as a web server with PHP support.
• PHP 7.1 or higher (PHP 7.2 is preferred) with the following PHP extensions enabled: PDO, GD graphics library, Zip and mbstring.

Step 1: Connect via SSH and Update the OS Packages

Log in to the server using SSH as root user (or a user with sudo privileges). You can do that by entering this command:

ssh root@IP_Address -p Port_Number

Remember to replace ‘root’ with your username if you are not using the root user. Also, replace IP_ADDRESS and PORT_NUMBER with your server’s respective IP address and SSH port number (the default is 22).

Once you are logged in, you should update all of your OS packages to their latest available versions.

yum clean all
yum update

Step 2: Install Apache and PHP 7.2

Apache is available within CentOS’s default software repositories, so simply run the following command to install Apache web server:

yum install httpd -y

After installing Apache, start the Apache server and enable it to start at boot time:

systemctl start httpd
systemctl enable httpd

CentOS 7 comes with PHP version 5.4. This is a problem because Cockpit CMS requires PHP version 7.1 or higher. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will install PHP version 7.2 using the Webtatic repository. To enable the Webtatic repository, run the following command:

rpm -Uvh https://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el7/webtatic-release.rpm

Then, run the following command to install PHP 7.2 and all necessary PHP extensions:

yum install php72w php72w-cli php72w-mbstring php72w-pdo php72w-sqlite php72w-gd php72w-zip

After installing PHP 7.2, you can check the PHP version installed on the server with the following command:

php -v

The output should be similar to the one below:

PHP 7.2.19 (cli) (built: Jun 2 2019 09:49:05) ( NTS )

Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group

Zend Engine v3.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies

Now we can download and install Cockpit.

Step 3: Download Cockpit CMS

Download and extract the latest version of Cockpit in the default web server document root directory (/var/www/html):

cd /var/www/html
wget https://github.com/agentejo/cockpit/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
mv cockpit-master cockpit

Then, run the following commands to set the correct permissions for Cockpit CMS (Apache needs to have ownership of the files in order for it to use them correctly):

chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/cockpit/

Step 4: Configure the Apache Web Server

In this part of the tutorial, we will show you how to configure Apache to serve your Cockpit CMS web pages.

Create a new Apache configuration file named cockpit.conf in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ directory on your server:

nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/cockpit.conf

(We’re using ‘nano’ to edit our text, however you can use your preferred text editor instead).

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@your_domain.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/cockpit
    ServerName your_domain.com
    ServerAlias www.your_domain.com
    <Directory /var/www/html/cockpit>
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>
    ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/your_domain.com-error_log
    CustomLog /var/log/httpd/your_domain.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Of course, don’t forget to replace your_domain.com with your actual domain name.

Save and close the file, then restart the Apache service for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart httpd

Step 5: Install Cockpit CMS

Now, you can open your preferred web browser and access http://your_domain.com/install . You should see the Cockpit CMS setup page. Simply follow the onscreen instructions and complete the Cockpit CMS installation.

After that, click on the LOGIN NOW button and provide the default administrator username and password: admin / admin. Once logged in, you should change the default administrator user account password immediately.

That’s it. You have successfully installed Cockpit CMS on your CentOS 7 VPS. For more information about how to manage your Cockpit installation, please refer to the official Cockpit documentation.

Of course, you don’t have to Install Cockpit on CentOS 7, if you use one of our Managed VPS Support services, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to Install Cockpit on CentOS 7 for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.

PS. If you liked this post on how to Install Cockpit on CentOS 7, please share it with your friends on the social networks using the share buttons, or simply leave a reply below. Thanks.

The post How to Install Cockpit on CentOS 7 appeared first on LinuxHostSupport.