Install Joomla 4 on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

Objective

The objective is to install Joomla 4 on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

Operating System and Software Versions

Operating System: – Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver
Software: – Joomla! 4.0.0-alpha2 Development

Requirements

Privileged access to your Ubuntu System as root or via sudo command is required.

Difficulty

EASY

Conventions

# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Instructions

Prerequsites

Let’s start by installing prerequisites. For the Joomla 4 installation we will need the curl and tasksel commands. The following linux command will install both:

$ sudo apt install -y wget tasksel

This guide will use the Ubuntu LAMP stack ( Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) to run under the Joomla 4 installation.

If you wish to run Joomla 4 using Nginx webserver then follow our guide on How To Install Nginx, MariaDB, PHP (LEMP stack) on Ubuntu 18.04.

Next, install the Ubuntu LAMP stack using the tasksel command and enable the rewrite mode:

$ sudo tasksel install lamp-server
$ sudo a2enmod rewrite

Furthermore, install the additional PHP module Joomla 4 requirements:

$ sudo apt install -y php-xml php-zip

Failing to install the php-xml package will result in Error displaying the error page.

As recommended by Joomla 4 installer disable PHP output_buffering. Use the bellow command to provide you with some hints on how to locate the appropriate php.ini file for your web-server installation:

$ php -i | grep php.ini$ | cut -d '>' -f2 | sed 's/cli/apache2/'

Next, the following linux command will disable output_buffering for the PHP version 7.2. Change your PHP version on the bellow command when appropriate, alternatively :

$ sudo sed -i 's/^output_buffering/\; output_buffering/' /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini

To apply the changes restart your Apache web server:

$ sudo systemctl restart apache2

We are now ready to download Joomla 4 installation package.

Download Joomla 4

At this stage we are ready to download and decompress the Joomla 4 tarball into webserver’s root directory. Start by downloading the latest Joomla 4 package and save it into your /tmp directory using your web browser.

Alternatively, the bellow command is using wget to download Joomla 4 tarball version 4.0.0 Alpha 2:

$ wget -O /tmp/4.0.0-alpha2.tar.gz https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/archive/4.0.0-alpha2.tar.gz

Next, install Joomla 4 files into Webserver’s root directory /var/www/html and change the file ownership to www-data. Change your downloaded Joomla 4 version number where appropriate:

$ sudo rm -fr /var/www/html
$ sudo tar xf /tmp/4.0.0-alpha2.tar.gz -C /var/www/
$ sudo mv /var/www/joomla-cms-4.0.0-alpha2/ /var/www/html
$ sudo chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/html

All set, we are now ready to configure a database for the Joomla 4 installation.

Configure Database

In this section we will create a new MySQL database joomla4 and assign a user access to it to a new user admin with password pass:

$ sudo mysqladmin create joomla4
$ sudo mysql -e "CREATE USER 'admin'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'pass';"
$ sudo mysql -e "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON joomla4.* TO 'admin'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;"

For more configuration options regarding the MySQL database installation visit our page: Install MySQL on Ubuntu 18.04.

Install Joomla 4 on Ubuntu

We are now ready to install Joomla 4.

Given that your Joomla 4 server can be resolved via joomla4-ubuntu host name, open up your browser and navigate to URL http://joomla4-ubuntu to access the Joomla 4 installation wizard: