Grav is a self-hosted, free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in the PHP programming language and based on the Symfony web application framework. It uses a flat-file database for both the backend and frontend.

It is a good alternative to WordPress, offering a Dashboard, an API, a package manager, backups, and SEO capabilities.

It also has a sophisticated, automatic cache system. It supports memcached, redis, xcache, etc., among other interesting features.

Links

• Documentation
• GitHub repository
• Forum for support/help.

Prerequisites

An Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS server with a root user or sudo privileges, and a DNS record to obtain a certificate with Certbot.

Installation

This article explains how to install Grav CMS, starting with installing and configuring NGINX with PHP and a Let's Encrypt certificate obtained using Certbot. Follow the steps below and run the indicated commands.

Update the repository and install the updates:

# apt update && apt upgrade -y

Go to the temporary directory and download Grav from the official website (includes the admin plugin):

# cd /tmp && wget -O grav-admin.zip https://getgrav.org/download/core/grav-admin/latest

Extract the downloaded file:

# apt install -y unzip && unzip grav-admin.zip

Install NGINX, PHP with the packages required by Grav (some packages are optional), and Certbot:

# apt install nginx php-cli php-fpm php-common php-curl php-gd php-zip php-apcu php-yaml php-xdebug php-mbstring php-xml php-json certbot python3-certbot-nginx -y

Check the PHP installation and version:

# php -v

Synchronize the extracted directory with the webroot:

# rsync -rtv grav-admin/ /var/www/html/

Change the owner and group recursively:

# chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/

Also change the directory permissions:

# chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/

Then edit the site file:

# vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Change server_name in the file to the subdomain or domain record:

server_name grav.ejemplo.com;

Add index.php to the index line:

index index.php;

Change the try_files line to:

try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;

Also uncomment the lines for PHP support and deny access to .htaccess (not used by NGINX). It will look like this:

# Pass PHP scripts to the FastCGI server
location ~ \.php$ {
                  # include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
                  include fastcgi.conf;
                  # fastcgi_index index.php;
                  # With php-fpm (or other Unix sockets):
                  fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.3-fpm.sock;
                  # With php-cgi (or other tcp sockets):
                  # fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                  fastcgi_param HTTPS on;
}
  # Deny access to .htaccess files if Apache's document root
  # matches nginx's document root
  #
  location ~ /\.ht {
                   deny all;
}

Verify the modified configuration with:

# nginx -t

Restart the web service to reload the changes:

# systemctl restart nginx.service

Finally, obtain a certificate with Certbot and enable redirection:

# certbot --nginx --redirect -d grav.ejemplo.com

After this last step, you can access the admin directly over HTTPS to complete the installation by creating a Grav user in your browser (https://grav.ejemplo.com/admin)

Congratulations! Grav is now installed on your server.

Remember, if you have any questions about this or any other issue related to your servers on Clouding, feel free to email soporte@clouding.io We’re here for whatever you need. Just ask!