Installing CentOS Web Panel

CentOS Web Panel is a free hosting management panel designed to simplify the administration of dedicated servers and VPS servers such as those from Clouding.io, largely avoiding the need to use the SSH console every time we need to perform a task. It offers many administration options and a wide variety of features to turn our server into an ideal hosting environment where we can manage a large number of websites.

If you are thinking about managing several websites, your own or your clients', on a VPS server such as those from Clouding.io, CentOS Web Panel is an excellent choice. With no license required, you have the same or more options than other paid solutions.
 

How to install CentOS Web Panel

We need a CentOS operating system. Starting with CentOS version 7 is recommended. If we start with a fresh, clean installation of CentOS, the steps needed to install CentOS Web Panel are as follows.

The first thing we must configure, or make sure is configured correctly, is our machine's Hostname. We need to have our server's name in the environment variable and in the hostname file.

Now we can begin installing CentOS Web Panel.

First we need to install the wget tool so we can download the Centos Web Panel package. To do this, we run the following command:

# yum -y install wget

Next we check whether we have any pending system updates. To do this, we run the following command:

# yum -y update

Once it finishes, we restart the system:

# reboot

Now it is time to install Centos Web Panel. We run this series of commands to start the installation process depending on the CentOS version:

# cd /usr/local/src
# wget http://centos-webpanel.com/cwp-el7-latest
# sh cwp-el7-latest

# cd /usr/local/src
# wget http://centos-webpanel.com/cwp-el8-latest
# sh cwp-el8-latest

The process can take about half an hour. Once it finishes, we restart the system again:

# reboot

After this restart, our server will ask for the root username and password. Once these are entered, CentOS Web Panel will start up, and the screen displayed should look very similar to this:

How to access CentOS Web Panel

We log in with our server's root user through a web browser on another machine on the local network, or through our domain if we have associated it with our VPS server at Clouding.io.

We have two panels for accessing CentOS Web Panel:

• To access the administration panel: http://myserver:2030
 

• To access the end-user panel: https://myserver:2031

Getting started

The product website recommends starting by configuring the following:

• Configure the server name
• Configure our server's IP
• Configure at least one hosting package or edit the default package
• Configure the root user's email to receive system notifications

With that, the system would be ready to start creating domains and managing our websites or our clients' accounts.
 

On the main screen, we can see a fairly extensive menu on the left with all our server's administration options. There we can manage our clients' accounts, the different PHP versions, databases, domains, etc.

In the center, we have server status information, resource usage, and a panel where we can manage starting or stopping Apache, FTP, MySQL, SSH, and other services.

On the right, you can see a more graphical view of our server's status: RAM, hard drive, installed versions of Apache, PHP, MySQL and FTP, and much more.

As you can see, this panel displays a great deal of information to keep everything under control in detail.

Additional documentation

In the CentOS Web Panel wiki, we can find additional information to learn how to configure our system.

Conclusions

As you have seen, installation is very simple. Now all that remains is to learn how to use it with the help of the wiki and try installing it on Clouding.io's VPS servers.

This post was written by Javier Rodríguez, an IT professional whose blog contains numerous tutorials related to system administration, web design with WordPress, and online stores, among other topics.