In this tutorial, we will guide you through the process of installing Vanilla Forums on your Elementary OS system. Vanilla Forums is a free, lightweight, and open-source forum software that allows users to create online communities.
Before proceeding with the installation, you need to make sure that your system is updated.
Vanilla Forums requires a working LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. If you have not installed LAMP on your system, execute the following command to install it.
sudo apt-get install lamp-server^
The caret (^) at the end of the command implies that all the necessary packages for the LAMP stack will be installed.
Execute the following commands to download and extract the latest version of Vanilla Forums.
cd /var/www/html/
sudo wget https://open.vanillaforums.com/get/vanilla-core.zip
sudo unzip vanilla-core.zip
This will download the Vanilla Forums package and extract it to /var/www/html/ directory.
Next, we need to set the file permissions.
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/
Vanilla Forums needs a separate MySQL database to store the forum data. Let's create a new user and a database for Vanilla Forums.
sudo mysql -u root -p
Enter the root password for MySQL and type the following commands inside the MySQL prompt.
mysql> CREATE DATABASE vanilla;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON vanilla.* TO 'vanillauser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'yourpassword';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> EXIT;
Note: Replace 'vanillauser' and 'yourpassword' with a username and password of your choice.
Copy the sample config file and configure the file with your MySQL database credentials.
cd /var/www/html/conf/
sudo cp config.php.new config.php
sudo nano config.php
Modify the following lines to match your MySQL database credentials.
$Configuration['Database']['Name'] = 'vanilla';
$Configuration['Database']['Host'] = '127.0.0.1';
$Configuration['Database']['User'] = 'vanillauser';
$Configuration['Database']['Password'] = 'yourpassword';
Save and close the file.
Restart the Apache web server.
sudo service apache2 restart
Now, go to your web browser and enter the IP address of your Elementary OS machine in the URL bar. You should see the Vanilla Forums installation page. Follow the instructions on the page to complete the installation.
After the installation, you can access the forum by entering the URL of your Elementary OS machine in the web browser.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Vanilla Forums on your Elementary OS system.
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