Concrete CMS

Concrete CMS is a Content Management System. Unlike Wordpress, it focuses on independent pages than blog posts.

Install

Download the latest version. Though the recommended method is Composer, it is too much to use only for Concrete installation. This article shows a simple way to download and unzip the file.

wget https://www.concretecms.org/download_file/2dxxxx/xxxx -O concrete.zip

Specify the output filename, or the saved file will be 4-digit without a .zip extension.

Unzip the downloaded file and move all files to /var/www.

unzip concrete.zip
sudo mv concrete-cms-9.x.x /var/www/concrete

Change the owner.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/concrete

Prepare Database

sudo mariadb

CREATE DATABASE concrete_cms;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON concrete_cms.* TO 'concrete'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Nginx configuration

Add a config file in /etc/nginx/sites-available/concrete.example.jp for SSL/TLS certificate.

server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;
        server_name concrete.example.jp;

        # Include certbot configuration
        include snippets/certbot.conf;
}

Enable this site.

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/concrete.example.jp /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/concrete.example.jp
sudo systemctl reload nginx

Issue an ssl certificate.

sudo certbot certonly --webroot -w /var/www/certbot/ -d concrete.example.jp

Complete the config file in /etc/nginx/sites-available/concrete.example.jp

server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;
        server_name concrete.example.jp;

        # Include certbot configuration
        include snippets/certbot.conf;
}

server {
        listen 443 ssl http2;
        listen [::]:443 ssl http2;

        ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/concrete.example.jp/fullchain.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/concrete.example.jp/privkey.pem;

        server_name concrete.example.jp;

        root /var/www/concrete;

        index index.php;

        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }

        location ~ \.php($|/) {
                include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
                fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php-fpm.sock;
        }

        access_log /var/log/nginx/concrete.example.jp-access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/concrete.example.jp-error.log;
}

Initial screens

Access https://concrete.example.com/ and installation will start. The installer will check if the required php modules are available.

They should be available through apt.

DOM Extension: php-xml
Image Manipulation: php-gd
XML support: php-xml (same as DOM Extension)
Internationalization Support: php-mbstring
Zip support: php-zip

The installation screens are self-explanatory, and there is no need to explain them here. Proceed the steps, and you will be logged in as an “admin” user.