Grav is a self-hosted, free software 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, offers a Dashboard, and has an API, a package manager, backups, and SEO capabilities.

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

Links

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

Prerequisites

An Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS server with a root user or permissions to run sudo, and a DNS record to obtain a certificate with Certbot.

Installation

This article explains how to install Grav CMS, first installing and configuring NGINX with PHP and a Let's Encrypt certificate obtained with Certbot. Follow these steps.

Update the repository and install the updates:

# apt update && apt upgrade

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

# cd /tmp && wget https://getgrav.org/download/core/grav-admin/latest/grav-admin-v1.7.17.zip

Unzip the downloaded file:

# apt install -y unzip && unzip grav-admin-v1.7.17.zip

Install NGINX, PHP with the Grav requirements (some optional packages), and Certbot:

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

Check the PHP installation and version:

# php -v

Synchronize the extracted directory with webroot:

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

Change the owner and group recursively:

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

Also modify 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;

Replace the try_files line with:

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

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

# pass PHP scripts to 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/php7.4-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
  # concurs with nginx's one
  #
  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 using redirect:

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

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