How To Install Centos Web Panel (CWP) On A Centos 7 Server

This is the third in a series of 4 articles aimed at server administrators who have very limited experience. In this article, I will explain how to install CWP on server with Centos 7.

The final article will focus on initial configuration of the Web Panel

Step 1. Prepare Your Centos Server

Before you can install Centos Web Panel (CWP), we need to

• Make sure the UMASK default setting is how we want it
• Set up your server's hostname
• install an additional program 'WGET'. WGET (Web Get) is a free utility which allows the user to download files from the web. 
• make sure all of the applications that run your server are up to date

To do all of this, you will need to fire up PuTTY (or Terminal if you're on a MAC) and log in to your server using the new username you created in the previous tutorial. See this article if you aren't familiar with using PuTTY.

Once you are logged in, you will need 'root' access, so enter:

You will be prompted for a password - the password required here is the 'root' password, not your user password. Make sure the cursor prompt changes from a $ to a #.

The Umask value affects the permissions that are allocated to new files depending on who creates the files. I have found that this often causes problems when creating new .PHP files (for example). In some cases the file is given a permission of 664 instead of 644 and this leads to a 500 server error because Mod Security doesn't allow Group 'write' permissions on .PHP files. As I find this incredibly irritating, I tend to update the setting to make sure that all new files are created with permission of 644.

To do this we edit the 'profile' file

Don't forget to press i to change to 'insert' mode then find any instances of umask 002 and change it to umask 022.

Press ESC then SHIFT + ZZ to save the file

Now enter:

It doesn't matter that yourdomain.com is not set up on your server yet, as long as it is your domain and that it will be located on your server later. The yourserver subdomain can be anything (I use cloudserver, others use srvr1 etc). If you want to check that the value has been accepted, enter:

This will output the hostname to the console window.

The next task is to install WGET

To install WGET, you will be using another utility - yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified). Yum is a program that manages installation, updates and removal for Red Hat package manager (RPM) Linux systems. There is a quick reference guide here for the use of yum.

Enter:

The -y element means that whenever the installation script needs confirmation to continue, this is automatically applied.

Next we're going to update all the server files for which there is a more recent version. Enter:

When that's complete, enter:

This restarts the server so the updates can be installed. At this point you will be unceremoniously dumped out of your PuTTY session as the connection will have been terminated.

Close the PuTTY window and  connect again using your login credentials. You will need to gain superuser access again, so enter:

once again, and enter the 'root' password.

Step 2. Install CWP

Change the current directory to this one:

Use wget to download the latest install script for CWP to your server:

Then install the package:

When CWP has been installed (it will probably take 10 - 15 minutes), you will be asked to copy some information from the PuTTY window. Make sure you note this information down carefully, then press enter to reboot the server.

You will be dumped out of PuTTY again, so you can close that window again.

You can now access your Centos Web Panel by opening your favourite browser and entering the url https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:2030   (where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is your server's ip address).

The final article in this series takes you through the main 'housekeeping' tasks to make your server ready to go out and make it's mark on the world !

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