How to Install Froxlor on Debian or Ubuntu VPS

This will show you exactly how to setup Froxlor server management panel (or control panel) on your VPS. It will include screenshot pics on every step so newbies can simply follow without a doubt. But before we start, it will be helpful to firstly know what is it.

About Froxlor

Well honestly its name doesn’t sound familiar in may ears and my tongue is a little bit difficult to pronounce it but that doesn’t make me stop to find out more about what Froxlor is. Shortly describing, Forxlor is a server administration software developed by experienced server administrators with a purpose to help its users easily administer / manage their servers. Froxlor comes as Open Source (GPL) licensed software or in my language it is a “free control panel“. Unlike VestaCP, KloxoMR or CentOS Web Panel, Froxlor doesn’t come shipped with a complete LAMP or LEMP stack, but however it has so many key features you can enjoy as a free web hosting control panel like:

• Multistack supported: ability to use both IPv4 and IPv6 or choose per domain which IPv4 and/or IPv6 addresses and which ports should be used.
• Advanced SSL feature allowing users to determine which ports should use SSL and allow customers to store certificates per domain.
• Save different PHP-configurations and choose per domain which php.ini should be used (FCGI/FPM only)
• Support popular web servers: Apache, Lighttpd or Nginx.
• Ability to manage reseller resources and limit what the customers may use in the dedicated customer panel.
• Traffic Calculation: Store dedicated HTTP, FTP and Mail traffic and view it in interactive graphs
• Support Ticket System: Allow your customers to create support tickets and reply directly within Froxlor – with online/offline indictator for the customers.
• Built-in WebFTP: Enable users to up- and download their files over FTP directly in the browser.
• Themeable UI: Style froxlor by overwriting the basis CSS or create your complete own theme
• MySQL management
• Directory protection & settings
• Quota management
• and more! See at https://www.froxlor.org/

Basic Requirements

As always, there are few prerequisites you have to or you better to complete:

1. A SSH client like Putty and basic knowledge about how to use it.
2. Basic knowledge about common Unix command to SSH to your server.
3. A server or VPS with at least 512MB of RAM (1GB recommended). If you not already have one then you can read my list of recommended VPS providers or this top low end cloud server providers. Quick recommendation: Atlantic.net, Digital Ocean and RamNode.
4. Make sure your server is running one of Froxlor’s supported OS: Debian Squeeze or Wheezy, Ubuntu 11.04 or 12.04. Using minimal template is recommended.
5. Make sure your VPS already has valid FQDN hostname (hostname.domain.tld)
6. About 20 minutes of your time
7. a cup of coffee or tea.

For your information, currently Froxlor is released only for Debian and Gentoo but it also works well on equivalent Ubuntu versions. In this tutorial I use a 1GB cloud vps from Atlantic.net running Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit but the steps are similar for Debian Wheezy.

UPDATE:
On September, 7th 2015 Froxlor v0.9.34 has been released bringing support to Debian 8 (Jessie) servers which means can also be installed on Ubuntu 14.04. See more detailed changes here.

Pre-section: Logging in

The very first step: open up your favorite SSH client and login to your server as root or as a user with root privilege (sudo).

Section 1: Installing LAMP

Please just move to section 2 if you have LAMP running on your VPS already.

Step 1 – Install Apache 2 using this simple apt-get command:

apt-get update -y
apt-get install apache2 -y

Step 2 – Now we are going to install PHP on it. There are several custom builds of PHP but this time you can simply use the one I use and follow the steps like what I did. Use following command to install PHP5 on your Ubuntu server:

apt-get install php5 php5-cgi php5-cli php5-common php5-curl php5-dev php5-gd php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl php5-suhosin php5-mcrypt php5-imap php5-imagick libapache2-mod-php5 -y

screenshot:

Step 3 – Next, install MySQL server:

apt-get install mysql-server php5-mysql -y

screenshot:

Step 4 – Do this for initial MySQL setup:

mysql_install_db
mysql_secure_installation

All you have to do is simply answering easy questions:

Section 2: Installing Froxlor

Froxlor can be installed easily using apt-get command but since it is not available in Ubuntu default repository so we have to add it manually:

Step 1 – Issue this command below to add Froxlor:

apt-get install python-software-properties -y
add-apt-repository "deb http://debian.froxlor.org wheezy main"

Step 2 – Next, we also need to add the software keys for Froxlor’s repository:

apt-key adv --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-key FD88018B6F2D5390D051343FF6B4A8704F9E9BBC

Step 3 – Now we can use apt-get to install Froxlor:

apt-get update -y
apt-get install froxlor php5-curl -y

screenshot:

Please pay close attention to the animated screenshot above. There are few questions you have to answer. Press the TAB key or arrow keys on our keyboard to navigate and press ENTER or RETURN to select an option.

Section3: Finishing Installation

Step 1 – Open up your favorite web browser and access Froxlor using your IP address:

http://x.x.x.x/froxlor

Note:
Change x.x.x.x with IP address of your VPS.

It will now display initial install page as below:

Click the Start Install link. Next, Froxlor will firstly check system requirements which if all requirements are satisfied, you can click the Click here to continue link

In the next page, there are several fields you have to fill including Database Connection details, Administration Account, and Server Settings. You may also need to note down each username and password.

As what you can see in that page, you are asked to choose which web server your server is currently running (Apache, Lighttpd or Nginx) but since in this tutorial we use Apache, so choose Apache.

Once done, click on the green Click here to continue button. Now Froxlor will once again test to make sure your settings are operational.

If you see the Froxlor was installed successfully text, that means the installation process are done and you can now login to Froxlor dashboard as Admin account (use username and password you defined). Now click the Click here to login link.

And here it is what Froxlor’s Dashboard page looks like:

That’s it for now. I believe the above step by step Froxlor installation guide are really easy-to-follow as I also put screenshot pic at every step. Do not hesitate to leave a comment below.

Next tutorial: Basic Setup for Floxor Control Panel

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