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Install eZ Platform

Note

Installation for production is only supported on Linux.

To install eZ Platform for development on macOS or Windows, see Install on macOS or Windows.

Prepare work environment

To install eZ Platform you need a stack with your operating system, MySQL or MariaDB, and PHP.

You can install it by following your favorite tutorial, for example: Install LAMP stack on Ubuntu.

Additionally, you need Node.js and Yarn for asset management.

For production you also need Apache or nginx as the HTTP server (Apache is used as an example below). For development, you can use the built-in PHP server instead.

You also need git for version control.

Before getting started, make sure you review the requirements page to see the systems we support and use for testing.

Get Composer

Install a recent stable version of Composer, the PHP command line dependency manager. Use the package manager for your Linux distribution. For example on Ubuntu:

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apt-get install composer

To verify you got a recent stable version of Composer, you can run:

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composer -V

Install Composer locally

If you want to install Composer inside your project root directory only, run the following command in the terminal:

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php -r "readfile('https://getcomposer.org/installer');" | php

After this you need to replace composer with php -d memory_limit=-1 composer.phar in all commands below.

Get eZ Platform

There are two ways to get eZ Platform. The result is the same, so you can use the way you prefer:

Authentication tokens for eZ Enterprise

If you are installing eZ Enterprise, from this point refer to Install eZ Enterprise.

A. Download eZ Platform

You can download eZ Platform from two sources:

1. Download an archive

Extract the archive into the location where you want your project root directory to be.

2. Clone GitHub repository

You can also clone the GitHub repository.

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git clone https://github.com/ezsystems/ezplatform .

Check out a tag (e.g. git checkout v1.13.4) for use in a project. Use branches (e.g. master or 1.13) only when contributing.

Install dependencies with Composer

Composer will look inside the composer.json file and install all of the packages required to run eZ Platform.

From the folder into which you downloaded eZ Platform, run:

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composer install

B. Create project with Composer

You can also use Composer to instantly create a project in the current folder with all the dependencies:

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composer create-project --keep-vcs ezsystems/ezplatform .

Tip

You can set different version constraints: specific tag (v2.2.0), version range (~1.13.0), stability (^2.3@rc), etc. For example if you want to get the latest stable 2.x release, with a minimum of v2.3.1, use:

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composer create-project --keep-vcs ezsystems/ezplatform . ^2.3.1

Provide installation parameters

After a moment the installer will ask you to provide a few parameters:

  1. Choose a secret; it should be a random string, made up of at least 32 characters, numbers, and symbols. This is used by Symfony when generating CSRF tokens, encrypting cookies, and for creating signed URIs when using ESI (Edge Side Includes).
  2. You can accept the default options for database_driver, database_host and database_port.
  3. Select a database_name or accept the default one.
  4. Provide your database_user and database_password.

Caution

The app secret is crucial to the security of your installation. Be careful about how you generate it, and how you store it. Here's one way to generate a 64 characters long, secure random string as your secret, from command line:

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php -r "print bin2hex(random_bytes(32));"

Do not commit the secret to version control systems, or share it with anyone who does not strictly need it. If you have any suspicion that the secret may have been exposed, replace it with a new one. The same goes for other secrets, like database password, Varnish invalidate token, JWT passphrase, etc.

After changing the app secret, make sure that you clear the application cache and log out all the users. For more information, see Symfony documentation.

Tip

If you want to change any of these parameters later, you can do it in app/config/parameters.yml.

Using PostgreSQL

If you want an installation with PostgreSQL instead of MySQL or MariaDB, refer to Using PostgreSQL.

Create database

Tip

You can omit this step. If you do not create a database now, it will be created automatically in the next step.

To manually create a database, ensure that you changed the installation parameters, then run the following Symfony command:

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php ./bin/console doctrine:database:create

Install eZ Platform

Install eZ Platform with:

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composer ezplatform-install

This command will also create a database, if you had not created it earlier. Before executing it make sure that the database user has sufficient permissions.

If Composer asks for your token, you must log in to your GitHub account and generate a new token (edit your profile, go to Developer settings > Personal access tokens and Generate new token with default settings). This operation is performed only once when you install eZ Platform Enterprise Edition for the first time.

Enabling Link manager

To make use of Link Manager, you need to set up cron.

Use PHP's built-in server

At this point you can use PHP's built-in server: php bin/console server:start.

If you want to use an Apache web server, you need to set up directory permissions and prepare a virtual host.

Caution

PHP's built-in server is for development use only. For security and performance reasons it should not be used in production.

Prepare installation for production

To use eZ Platform with an HTTP server, you need to set up directory permissions and prepare a virtual host.

Set up permissions

For development needs, the web user can be made the owner of all your files (for example with the www-data web user):

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chown -R www-data:www-data <your installation directory>

Directories var and web/var need to be writable by CLI and web server user. Future files and directories created by these two users will need to inherit those permissions.

Caution

For security reasons, in production web server should not have write access to other directories than var. Skip the step above and follow the link below for production needs instead.

You must also make sure that the web server cannot interpret files in the var directory through PHP. To do so, follow the instructions on setting up a virtual host below.

To set up permissions for production, it is recommended to use an ACL (Access Control List). See Setting up or Fixing File Permissions in Symfony documentation for information on how to do it on different systems.

Set up virtual host

Option A: Scripted configuration

Use the included shell script: /<your installation directory>/bin/vhost.sh to generate a ready to use .conf file. Check out the source of vhost.sh to see the options provided.

Option B: Manual configuration

Copy /<your installation directory>/doc/apache2/vhost.template to /etc/apache2/sites-available as a .conf file.

Modify it to fit your project.

Specify /<your installation directory>/web as the DocumentRoot and Directory. Uncomment the line that starts with #if [SYMFONY_ENV] and set the value to prod or dev, depending on the environment you want:

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SetEnvIf Request_URI ".*" SYMFONY_ENV=prod

Enable virtual host

When the virtual host file is ready, enable the virtual host and disable the default:

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a2ensite ezplatform
a2dissite 000-default.conf

Finally, restart the Apache server. The command may vary depending on your Linux distribution. For example of Ubuntu use:

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service apache2 restart

Open your project in the browser and you should see the welcome page.

Enterprise

If you are installing eZ Enterprise, take a look at Installing eZ Enterprise for additional steps.

Security checklist

See the Security checklist for a list of security-related issues you should take care of before going live with a project.