Install Bolt CMS on Ubuntu 18.04 with Nginx

Install Bolt CMS on Ubuntu 18.04 with Nginx on Google Cloud Platform. This guide helps to install and run Bolt CMS on Google Compute Engine and connect with Cloud SQL.

This setup is tested on Google Cloud Platform, it will also work fine on other cloud serveices and on any VPS or Dedicated servers running Ubuntu.

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Prerequisites

A running Compute Engine, see the Setting up Compute Engine Instance with Ubuntu 18.04
Initial Ubuntu Server Set up.
Install LEMP stack on Ubuntu in Google Cloud.
A running Cloud SQL instance, see How to set up Cloud SQL in Google Cloud

With the above-completed prerequisites, I assume you have your Nginx, PHP installed and Cloud SQL is configured.

Install Required PHP Extensions

sudo apt install php7.3-intl

Set up your Website Directory

Your website will be located in the home directory and have the following structure

Replace yourdomainname.com with your original domain name.

home
 -- yourdomainname.com
 ---- logs
 ---- public

The public directory is your website’s root directory and logs directory for your error logs

Now we create these directories and set correct permissions

You need to SSH into your VM Instance and run these commands

mkdir -p yourdomainname.com/logs yourdomainname.com/public
sudo chmod -R 755 yourdomainname.com

Configure Nginx

Create a new Nginx configuration for your website in the sites-available directory.

 sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomainname.com

Copy and paste the following configuration, ensure that you change the server_name, error_log and root directives to match your domain name. Hit CTRL+X followed by Y to save the changes.

 server {
     listen 80;
     listen [::]:80;
     server_name yourdomainname.com www.yourdomainname.com;

     error_log /home/username/yourdomainname.com/logs/error.log;

     root /home/username/yourdomainname.com/public/;
     index index.html index.php;

     location / {
         try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
     }

     location = /bolt {
         try_files $uri /index.php?$query_string;
     }

     location ^~ /bolt/ {
         try_files $uri /index.php?$query_string;
     }

     location ^~ /thumbs {
         try_files $uri /index.php; #?$query_string;
         access_log off;
         log_not_found off;
         expires max;
         add_header Pragma public;
         add_header Cache-Control "public, mustrevalidate, proxy-revalidate";
         add_header X-Koala-Status sleeping;
     }

     location ~* ^.+.(?:atom|bmp|bz2|css|doc|eot|exe|gif|gz|ico|jpe?g|jpeg|jpg|js|map|mid|midi|mp4|ogg|ogv|otf|png|ppt|rar|rtf|svg|svgz|tar|tgz|ttf|wav|woff|xls|zip)$ {
         access_log off;
         log_not_found off;
         expires max;
         add_header Pragma public;
         add_header Cache-Control "public, mustrevalidate, proxy-revalidate";
         add_header X-Koala-Status eating;
     }

     location = /(?:favicon.ico|robots.txt) {
         log_not_found off;
         access_log off;
     }

     location ~ /index.php/(.*) {
         rewrite ^/index.php/(.*) /$1 permanent;
     }

     location ~ /. {
         deny all;
     }

     location ~ /.(htaccess|htpasswd)$ {
         deny all;
     }

     location ~ /.(?:db)$ {
         deny all;
     }

     location ~* /(.*).(?:markdown|md|twig|yaml|yml)$ {
         deny all;
     }

     location ~ \.php$ {
         try_files $uri =404;
         fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
         fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.3-fpm.sock;
         fastcgi_index index.php;
         include fastcgi_params;
     }
}

Hit Ctrl+X followed by Y and Enter to save the file and exit.

To enable this newly created website configuration, symlink the file that you just created into the sites-enabled directory.

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomainname.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/yourdomainname.com

Check your configuration and restart Nginx for the changes to take effect.

sudo nginx -t
sudo service nginx restart

Download Bolt CMS

Navigate into your root directory.

cd ~/home/username/yourdomainame.com/public

Download the latest version of Bolt CMS.

curl -O https://bolt.cm/distribution/bolt-latest.tar.gz
tar -xzf bolt-latest.tar.gz --strip-components=1

Once Bolt is downloaded you need to set up correct permissions.

Set Up Permissions

To give Bolt write access to these files you have to use the chmod command.

chmod -R 777 app/cache/ app/config/ app/database/ extensions/
chmod -R 777 public/thumbs/ public/extensions/ public/files/ public/theme/

Set Up Database Configurations

By default Bolt is configured to use SQLite, so we can change it to use MySQL database in the app/config/config.yml file and connect it to Cloud SQL.

sudo nano ~/yourdomainname.com/public/app/config/config.yml

Edit the database section and replace the following with your Cloud SQL details

driver with mysql
host with your Cloud SQL IP Address
databasename with Cloud SQL database name
username with Cloud SQL user name
password with your password
prefix with your database prefix

Your details will look something similar to the one below.

database:
     driver: mysql
     username: USERNAME
     password: PASSWORD
     databasename: DATABASE_NAME
     host: CLOUD_SQL_IP_ADDRESS
     prefix: prefix_