Cachet is a beautiful and powerful open source status page system written in PHP that allows you to better communicate downtime and system failures to your customers, teams, and shareholders. The application offers many features, the most important of which are: a powerful JSON API, event reports, metrics, transcription support for event messages, subscriber notifications via email, two-factor authentication. In this tutorial, we will install the Cachet status page system using PHP, Nginx, MySQL and Composer on the Fedora 29 system.
Requirements
To run Cachet on your Fedora 29 system you will need a couple of things:
- PHP version 7.1 or greater
- HTTP server with PHP support (eg: Nginx, Apache, Caddy)
- Composer
- A supported database: MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite
- Git
Prerequisites
- A Fedora 29 operating system.
- A non-root user with sudo privileges.
Initial steps
Check your Fedora version:
cat /etc/fedora-release # Fedora release 29 (Twenty Nine)
Set up the timezone:
timedatectl list-timezones sudo timedatectl set-timezone 'Region/City'
Update your operating system packages (software). This is an important first step because it ensures you have the latest updates and security fixes for your operating system's default software packages:
sudo dnf check-upgrade || sudo dnf upgrade -y
Install some essential packages that are necessary for basic administration of the Fedora operating system:
sudo dnf install -y curl wget vim git unzip socat bash-completion
Step 1 - Install PHP
Install PHP, as well as the necessary PHP extensions:
sudo dnf install -y php-cli php-fpm php-common php-xml php-gd php-zip php-mbstring php-mysqlnd php-pgsql php-sqlite3 php-opcache php-apcu php-json
To show PHP compiled in modules, you can run:
php -m ctype curl exif fileinfo . . . . . .
Check PHP version:
php --version
Start and enable PHP-FPM service:
sudo systemctl start php-fpm.service sudo systemctl enable php-fpm.service
We can move on to the next step, which is the database installation and setup.
Step 2 - Install MariaDB and create a database for Cachet
Cachet supports MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and SQLite databases. In this tutorial, we will use MariaDB as the database server.
Install MariaDB database server:
sudo dnf install -y mysql-server
Check MariaDB version:
mysql --version
Start and enable MariaDB service:
sudo systemctl start mariadb.service sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service
Run mysql_secure installation script to improve MariaDB security and set the password forMariaDB root user:
sudo mysql_secure_installation
Answer each of the questions:
Would you like to setup VALIDATE PASSWORD plugin? N New password: your_secure_password Re-enter new password: your_secure_password 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
Connect to MariaDB shell as the root user:
sudo mysql -u root -p # Enter password
Create an empty MariaDB database and user for Cachet and remember the credentials:
MariaDB> CREATE DATABASE dbname; MariaDB> GRANT ALL ON dbname.* TO 'username' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';MariaDB> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Exit from MariaDB:
MariaDB> exit
Replace dbname, username and password with your own names.
Step 3 - Install Acme.sh client and obtain Let's Encrypt certificate (optional)
Securing your website with HTTPS is not necessary, but it is a good practice to secure your site traffic. In order to obtain TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt we will use acme.sh client. Acme.sh is a pure UNIX shell software for obtaining TLS certificates from Let's Encrypt with zero dependencies.
Download and install acme.sh:
sudo su - root git clone https://github.com/Neilpang/acme.sh.git cd acme.sh ./acme.sh --install --accountemail your_email@example.com source ~/.bashrc cd ~
Check acme.sh version:
acme.sh --version # v2.8.0
Obtain RSA and ECC/ECDSA certificates for your domain/hostname:
# RSA 2048 acme.sh --issue --standalone -d example.com --keylength 2048 # ECDSA acme.sh --issue --standalone -d example.com --keylength ec-256
If you want fake certificates for testing you can add the --staging flag to the above commands.
After running the above commands, your certificates and keys will be in:
For RSA: /home/username/example.com directory.
For ECC/ECDSA: /home/username/example.com_ecc directory.
To list your issued certs you can run:
acme.sh --list
Create a directory to store your certs. We will use the /etc/letsencrypt directory.
mkdir -p /etc/letsecnrypt/example.com sudo mkdir -p /etc/letsencrypt/example.com_ecc
Install/copy certificates to /etc/letsencrypt directory.
# RSA acme.sh --install-cert -d example.com --cert-file /etc/letsencrypt/example.com/cert.pem --key-file /etc/letsencrypt/example.com/private.key --fullchain-file /etc/letsencrypt/example.com/fullchain.pem --reloadcmd "sudo systemctl reload nginx.service" # ECC/ECDSA acme.sh --install-cert -d example.com --ecc --cert-file /etc/letsencrypt/example.com_ecc/cert.pem --key-file /etc/letsencrypt/example.com_ecc/private.key --fullchain-file /etc/letsencrypt/example.com_ecc/fullchain.pem --reloadcmd "sudo systemctl reload nginx.service"
All the certificates will be automatically renewed every 60 days.
After obtaining certs exit form root user and return back to normal sudo user:
exit
Step 4 - Install and configure NGINX
Cachet can work fine with many web servers. In this tutorial, we selected Nginx. If you prefer Apache web server over Nginx, visit https://docs.cachethq.io/docs/installing-cachet#section-running-cachet-on-apache to learn more.
Install Nginx:
sudo dnf install -y nginx
Check Nginx version:
sudo nginx -v
Start and enable Nginx service:
sudo systemctl start nginx.service sudo systemctl enable nginx.service
Configure Nginx for Cachet by running:
sudo vim /etc/nginx/conf.d/cachet.conf
And populate the file with the following configuration:
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
listen 443 ssl;
listen [::]:443 ssl;
server_name status.example.com;
root /var/www/cachet/public;
index index.php;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/status.example.com/fullchain.cer;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/status.example.com/status.example.com.key;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/status.example.com_ecc/fullchain.cer;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/status.example.com_ecc/status.example.com.key;
location / {
try_files $uri /index.php$is_args$args;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_keep_conn on;
}
}
Test NGINX configuration:
sudo nginx -t
Reload Nginx:
php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('sha384', 'composer-setup.php') === '48e3236262b34d30969dca3c37281b3b4bbe3221bda826ac6a9a62d6444cdb0dcd0615698a5cbe587c3f0fe57a54d8f5') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
Check Composer version:
composer --version # Composer version 1.8.4 2019-02-11 10:52:10
Step 6 - Install Cachet
Create a document root directory where Cachet should reside in:
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/cachet
Change ownership of the /var/www/cachet directory to {jour_user}:
sudo chown -R {your_user}:{your_user} /var/www/cachet
NOTE: Replace {jour_user} with your initially created non-root user username.
Navigate to the document root directory:
cd /var/www/cachet
Download the Cachet source code with Git:
git clone -b 2.4 --single-branch https://github.com/cachethq/Cachet.git .
Copy .env.example to .env file and configure database and APP_URL settings in .env file:
cp .env.example .env vim .env
Install Cachet dependencies with Composer:
composer install --no-dev -o
Set up the application key by running:
php artisan key:generate
Install Cachet:
php artisan cachet:install
Provide the appropriate ownership:
sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /var/www/cachet
Run sudo vim /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf and set the user and group to nginx. Initially, they will be set to apache:
sudo vim /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf # user = nginx # group = nginx
Open your site in a web browser and follow the instructions on the screen to finish Cachet installation.
Step 7 - Complete the Cachet setup
Select cache and session drivers and configure mail options:
Configure general site settings like site name, site domain, timezone and language:
Create an administrative user account:
After that, you should get a message that Cachet has been configured successfully. You can open Cachet dashboard by pressing "Go to dashboard" button:
Cachet has been successfully installed
Cachet installation and setup has been completed.
To access Cachet dashboard append /dashboard to your website URL.
