Automad is an open source file-based content management system (CMS) and template engine written in PHP. The Automad source code is hosted on GitHub. This guide will show you how to install Automad CMS on a CentOS 7 Vultr instance.
PHP version 5.4 or higher.
Web server software. In this guide, we use Nginx.
Check the CentOS version.
cat /etc/centos-release
# CentOS Linux release 7.6.1810 (Core)
Create a new non-root user account with sudo access and switch to it.
useradd -c "John Doe" johndoe && passwd johndoe
usermod -aG wheel johndoe
su - johndoe
NOTE: Replace johndoe with your username.
Set up the timezone.
timedatectl list-timezones
sudo timedatectl set-timezone 'Region/City'
Ensure that your system is up to date.
sudo yum check-upgrade || sudo yum upgrade -y
Install the needed packages.
sudo yum install -y socat git vim unzip epel-release
Disable SELinux and Firewall.
sudo setenforce 0 ; sudo systemctl stop firewalld ; sudo systemctl disable firewalld
Setup the Webtatic YUM repo.
sudo rpm -Uvh https://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el7/webtatic-release.rpm
Install PHP, as well as the necessary PHP extensions.
sudo yum install -y php72w php72w-cli php72w-fpm php72w-common php72w-mbstring php72w-xmlrpc php72w-soap php72w-gd php72w-xml php72w-curl php72w-zip php72w-json
Check the version.
php --version
# PHP 7.2.17 (cli) (built: May 13 2019 18:03:04) ( NTS )
# Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
# Zend Engine v3.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies
Start and enable PHP-FPM service.
sudo systemctl start php-fpm.service
sudo systemctl enable php-fpm.service
Install Nginx.
sudo yum install -y nginx
Check the version.
nginx -v
# nginx version: nginx/1.12.2
Start and enable Nginx.
sudo systemctl start nginx.service
sudo systemctl enable nginx.service
Run sudo vim /etc/nginx/conf.d/automad.conf and populate the file with the following configuration.
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
root /var/www/automad;
index index.php index.html;
client_max_body_size 100M;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}
Test the configuration.
sudo nginx -t
Reload Nginx.
sudo systemctl reload nginx.service
Create a document root directory.
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/automad
Change ownership of the /var/www/automad directory to johndoe.
sudo chown -R johndoe:johndoe /var/www/automad
Navigate to the document root.
cd /var/www/automad
Using curl download the latest release of Automad CMS. Don't forget to bump up the version numbers if there is a newer release.
curl -O -J -L https://automad.org/download
Uncompress the zip archive.
unzip marcantondahmen-automad-6fff2a0456dc.zip
Move all Automad files to the document root and remove zip archive.
mv marcantondahmen-automad-6fff2a0456dc/* . && mv marcantondahmen-automad-6fff2a0456dc/.* .
rm marcantondahmen-automad-6fff2a0456dc.zip
rmdir marcantondahmen-automad-6fff2a0456dc
Change ownership of the /var/www/automad directory to nginx.
sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /var/www/automad
Run sudo vim /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf and set the user and group to nginx. Initially, they are set to apache.
sudo vim /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf
# user = nginx
# group = nginx
Restart the PHP-FPM service.
sudo systemctl restart php-fpm.service
As the last step, create a user account to use the browser-based user interface called the Dashboard. Therefore navigate to https://yoursite.com/dashboard and follow the instructions.