Setup Herbie CMS on Ubuntu 16.04 | 18.04 | 18.10 with Nginx and PHP 7.2-FPM

The steps below show students ane new users how to configure Herbie CMS on Ubuntu with Nginx HTTP and PHP 7.2-FPM support. Our previous post showed you how to do it with Apache2, this one uses Nginx instead.

Herbie is a free open source, flat-file CMS (Content Management System) that allows you build fully functional websites or blogs with simple markup and text files without the need of a separate database. Just upload the web content files to your server and enjoy!

It offers features that may not be available to other PHP based CMS, like WordPress Joomla or Drupal.

For one, it doesn’t need a database server, call it database-less. It comes all features that you need but is smaller than WordPress, like SEO friendly design, flexible CSS framework and more.

Herbie uses a unique algorithm to find or list any content based on date, type, category, tag, or author, and the performance will remain fast even if you have thousands of posts and hundreds of tags.

For more about Herbie, please check it homepage.

This brief tutorial shows students and new users how to install Herbie on Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 LTS  / 18.10 with Nginx and PHP 7.2-FPM support.

Step 1: Install Nginx HTTP Server

Herbie CMS requires a web server and Nginx HTTP server is probably the second most popular open source web server available today. To install Nginx server, run the commands below:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx

After installing Nginx, the commands below can be used to stop, start and enable Nginx service to always start up with the server boots.

sudo systemctl stop nginx.service
sudo systemctl start nginx.service
sudo systemctl enable nginx.service

Now that Nginx is installed. to test whether the web server is working, open your browser and browse to the URL below.

If you see the page above, then Nginx is successfully installed.

Step 2: Install PHP 7.2-FPM and Related Modules

Herbie CMS is a PHP based CMS and PHP is required. However, PHP 7.2-FPM may not be available in Ubuntu default repositories. To run PHP 7.2-FPM on Ubuntu 16.04 and previous, you may need to run the commands below:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

Then update and upgrade to PHP 7.2-FPM

sudo apt update

Next, run the commands below to install PHP 7.2-FPM and related modules.

sudo apt install php7.2-fpm php7.2-common php7.2-mbstring php7.2-xmlrpc php7.2-sqlite3 php7.2-soap php7.2-gd php7.2-xml php7.2-cli php7.2-curl php7.2-zip

After installing PHP 7.2, run the commands below to open PHP default configuration file for Nginx.

sudo nano /etc/php/7.2/fpm/php.ini

The lines below is a good settings for most PHP based CMS. Update the configuration file with these and save.

file_uploads = On
allow_url_fopen = On
short_open_tag = On
memory_limit = 256M
cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0
upload_max_filesize = 100M
max_execution_time = 360
date.timezone = America/Chicago

Everytime you make changes to PHP configuration file, you should also restart Nginx web server. To do so, run the commands below:

sudo systemctl restart nginx.service

Now that PHP is installed, to test whether it’s functioning, create a test file called phpinfo.php in Nginx default root directory. ( /var/www/html/)

sudo nano /var/www/html/phpinfo.php

Then type the content below and save the file.

<?php phpinfo( ); ?>

Next, open your browser and browse to the server’s hostname or IP address followed by phpinfo.php

You should see PHP default test page.

Step 4: Download Herbie Latest Release

To get Herbie latest release you may want to use Github repository. Install Composer, Curl and other dependencies to get started.

sudo apt install curl git
curl -sS  | sudo php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

After installing curl and Composer above, change into the Nginx root directory and download Herbie packages from Github.

cd /var/www/html/
sudo composer create-project getherbie/start-website herbie

Then run the commands below to set the correct permissions for Herbie to adjust the directory permissions.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/herbie/
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/herbie/

Step 5: Configure Nginx Herbie Site

Finally, configure Nginx configuration file for Herbie. This file will control how users access Herbie content. Run the commands below to create a new configuration file called herbie

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/herbie

Then copy and paste the content below into the file and save it. Replace the highlighted line with your own domain name and directory root location.

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    root /var/www/html/herbie;
    index  index.php index.html index.htm;
    server_name  example.com www.example.com;

     client_max_body_size 100M;

     autoindex off;
  
     location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
      }

    location ~ \.php$ {
         include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
         fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
         fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
         include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

Save the file and exit.

After configuring the VirtualHost above, enable it by running the commands below

Step 6: Enable Herbie Site and Rewrite Module

After configuring the VirtualHost above, enable it by running the commands below, then restart Nginx server.

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/herbie /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo systemctl restart nginx.service

Next, open your browser and browse to the server hostname or IP address and you should see Herbie page. enter your blog info and complete the setup.

Herbie began as a databaseless flat file content management system. It’s structure allowed you to have just the amount of functionality you needed in a flat file CMS solution, adding extensions (blade packs) for further functionality, whilst allowing setup on simple servers with no database.

You may also like the post below: