How to Install Dotclear on Debian 9 (Stretch)

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Dotclear is a very simple blogging engine. It is open-source and easy to use. This tutorial will go through the installation on a Vultr high performance SSD VPS running Debian 9.

Prerequisites

• Vultr VPS with Debian 9
• Apache2, PHP and MySQL/MariaDB (LAMP stack)
• An SSH client of your choice to access the VPS.
• wget (apt install wget)

Log into your Vultr VPS as root using SSH. Navigate to your web root directory, usually /var/www/html/, and delete everything to prepare the directory for the Dotclear installation:

cd /var/www/html
rm * -rf

Also, make sure Apache owns this directory:

chown www-data:www-data . -R

MySQL Setup

We need to create a database for Dotclear. First, login to the MySQL shell:

mysql -u root -p

Then, create a new database and assign a new user to it. Replace password with a password of your choice. The password should be complex and long enough to adhere to the best security practices:

CREATE DATABASE dotclear;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON dotclear.* TO dotclearuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
\q

Dotclear Installation

Ensure that your session is still in the var/www/html folder.

cd /var/www/html

Download the Dotclear loader PHP script:

wget https://download.dotclear.org/loader/dotclear-loader.php

Open a web browser of your choice and navigate to http://your_vps_ip/dotclear-loader.php and follow the instructions. During the installation, you will be asked for database details. Use the following details. Be sure to replace password with the password you chose earlier:

Database type: MySQLi
Database Host Name: localhost
Database Name: dotclear
Database User Name: dotclearuser
Database Password: password

Finally, continue along to complete the installation.