Concrete5 is an open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP. It was designed for ease of use and provides a web interface that allows users to edit content right from the page. Concrete5 can be installed on top of a LAMP stack in Ubuntu 18.04. This content management system was created in 2003. Its purpose was based on supporting pixel websites for an online store of national brands. It was not a blog tool, news site, or any other solution. This CMS is ISO 27001 certified upon download for use on your systems. Alternatively, you can host and benefit from our many years of experience with secure websites for the US government and Fortune 500 companies.

Installing dependencies (Apache, MySQL, PHP)

Comcrete5 is powered by LAMP, so this step is required and very important. This can be done using the following special commands:

apt-get update
apt-get install apache2 mysql-server php7.0 php7.0-mysql php7.0-gd php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-xml php7.0-mbstring libapache2-mod-php7.0 unzip -y

Enter your secure MySQL password when prompted.

MySQL Database Setup

Once you have successfully installed all the dependencies, you can proceed to configure MySQL. Start the installation by running the following command:

/usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation

Next, you will be asked to enter your MySQL password you created earlier. Answer the requested and required questions to complete the installation

Would you like to setup VALIDATE PASSWORD plugin? [Y/N] N
Change the root password? [Y/N] N
Remove anonymous users? [Y/N] Y
Disallow root login remotely? [Y/N] Y
Remove test database and access to it? [Y/N] Y
Reload privilege tables now? [Y/N] Y

Create MySQL Database for Concrete5

The first step is to log into the MySQL console

mysql -u root -p

Next, we will ask for the password that you created earlier. After logging into the MySQL console, create a new database for Concrete5

mysql>CREATE DATABASE concrete5_db;

After that, create a new user with the granted special rights to the newly created Concrete5 database. You can replace user_name and password with any username and password of your choice

mysql>GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on concrete5_db.* to 'user_name'@'localhost' identified by 'password';
mysql>FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Close the MySQL console

mysql>exit

Launching and Installing Concrete5 CMS

Go to the root directory of your Apache server

cd /var/www/html

After that, you need to download the Concrete5 archive from the official site. Then unzip it and move the extracted files to /var/www/concrete5

wget --trust-server-names http://www.concrete5.org/download_file/-/view/96959/ -O concrete5.zip
unzip concrete5.zip
rm concrete5.zip
mv concrete5-8.2.1 concrete5
cd concrete5

Make the concrete5 directory writable for Concrete5

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/concrete5

Enable Apache rewrite module

sudo a2enmod rewrite

Restart Apache

systemctl restart apache2

Complete the Installation Using the Concrete5 Web Interface

You can now complete the installation using the Concrete5 web interface. Open your web browser and go to, http://[your-server-ip]/concrete5 to launch the installer. During installation, you will be prompted to enter your MySQL options. Use the user_name, password and database name you created earlier

MySQL Username: user_name
MySQL Password: password
Database Name: concrete5_db

Now, the installation is complete, you can navigate to the newly created Concrete5 based website.