How to install Froxlor on CentOS 5.5 with Nginx server

For Apache server, there are more than enough control panels for you to choose from such as cPanel, Direct Admin, Plesk and so on.   However, there are not that many choices for Nginx.  If you have already installed your Nginx sever with the LNMP  package I introduced, you might find this post helpful.

Froxlor is a newly created web-based managing panel for multiple webhosting servers, for more information, you can hop to the official site http://www.froxlor.org/ .

Before the installation of Froxlor, I assume you have already set your Nginx server up and running.  If you haven’t already done so, you can visit my previous post on how to install Nginx server with the LNMP structure.

To eliminate unnecessary permission problems, I am going to use SSH to control server, in my case, it’s CentOS 5.5.

1. Download Froxlor with the following command:

wget -c http://files.froxlor.org/releases/froxlor-latest.tar.gz

2. Use the following command to extract the compact file:

tar xvfz froxlor-latest.tar.gz

3. Move the extracted folder to the server root folder, in my case, it’s “/home/wwwroot/”, “mv PATH-OF-FROXLOR-FOLER /home/wwwroot/“, in my case, the full command is as following:

mv /temp/froxlor /home/wwwroot/

*Note: There are space in between command and two folders.

4. Now navigate to the web directory in your browser.  You will see the following screen:

5. Click on “configure froxlor“, and you will be redirect the the next page which will check your server’s setting:

6. If your server goes well, you can just simply click on “Continue installation” and we can fill in the information in the next page:

Now let me pause here and explain a little bit of the Database and Administrator section.

MySQL-Hostname: usually 127.0.0.1 or localhost .
MySQL-Database: Create a new MySQL database, by default, the name is froxlor
Username for MySQL-account: the username for froxlor’s database, by default it’s froxlor, but you can change it
Password for the unprivileged MySQL-account: the password you for the unprivileged MySQL-account

Username for MySQL-root-account: usually it’s root
Password for the MySQL-root-account: password for user root

Administrator Username: the username you want to use for web-based Froxlor panel, for security reason, please change to other username

7. As for the server setting you see underneath:

Server name (FQDN): I simply type in the IP address for the server’s name
Server IP: ther server IP address
Webserver: We use Nginx in this case
HTTP username is www if you use LNMP
HTTP groupname is also www if you use LNMP.

8. Once you filled everything in correctly, your installation of Froxlor is done:

9. If you read carefully, you are told to “move /tmp/userdata.inc.php to lib/”.  Just a note that, this lib folder is not related to the root folder of your server, it’s actually “YOUR-WEB-SERVER-PATH/froxlor/lib/”, so I use the following command to move the userdata.inc.php:

mv /tmp/userdata.inc.php /home/wwwroot/froxlor/lib/

10. Now navigate to froxlor’s directory, you can find your froxlor panel’s installation is finally completed, and you can use the administrator account you set up during step 6.

Alright, have fun with this little tutorial on setting up Froxlor on CentOS 5.5 + Nginx.