How To Install ISPConfig On CentOS / RHEL

Lately I’ve shown you how to install CentOS 5.1 on VMware Server (or Workstation). Assuming you’ve installed CentOS following the Perfect Setup, we will now see how to install ISPConfig.

ISPConfig is a free web hosting control panel for Linux that offers some nice features as well as three levels of management: server administration, reseller and website management. It is important that you have no other control panel installed on your server before proceeding.

Installing ISPConfig

The installation is pretty straight forward and you can find the official documentation here. Anyway here’s my quick and dirty guide to installing ISPConfig on CentOS. The following must be performed as root:

cd /tmp
wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ispconfig/ISPConfig-2.2.19.tar.gz
tar xvzf ISPConfig-2.2.19.tar.gz
cd install_ispconfig
./setup

For my part, I’ve gone through the standard setup and left the default values for the certificate informations as this is only a test server. If you’re setting up a production server you should enter these informations though.

At steps 7 and 8, it is very important that you do not specify a pass phrase. Otherwise you will be prompted to enter this pass phrase at boot time. What does this mean? It means that your server will not be able to reboot without human intervention. Now that’s a problem if you’re installing ISPConfig remotely!

When you’re done installing ISPConfig, you should be able to access it at http://yourserver:81 (or https://yourserver:81 depending on which one you chose during setup).

ISPConfig : [error] an unknown filter was not added: PHP

Going through my apache log files, I’ve found the above error message. This is due to the fact that ISPConfig creates a Vhosts file where it stores all virtual hosts settings. This file contains a filter-based parameter that instruct apache to process PHP files.  Since Apache2, the apache2handler is not filter-based anymore.

While this does not have any other effect than clogging your log files, you can prevent this by editing /home/admispconfig/ispconfig/lib/config.inc.php and replacing

$go_info["server"]["apache2_php"] = ‘both’;

by

$go_info["server"]["apache2_php"] = ‘addtype’;

Now simply restart the ISPConfig service:

/etc/init.d/ispconfig_server restart

Uninstallating ISPConfig

If you ever need to remove ISPConfig, here’s how to do it:

cd /root/ispconfig
./uninstall
rm -rf /home/admispconfig

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