How to Install Attendize on CentOS 7

Introduction

Attendize is an open source ticket selling and event management platform based on the Laravel PHP Framework. Attendize source code is publicly hosted on Github. This guide will show you how to install Attendize on a fresh CentOS 7 Vultr instance.

Requirements

• Nginx
• MariaDB
• PHP version 7.1.3 or greater with the following extensions:
• OpenSSL
• PDO
• Mbstring
• Tokenizer
• Fileinfo
• GD

Before you begin

Check the CentOS version.

cat /etc/centos-release
# CentOS Linux release 7.6.1810 (Core)

Create a new non-root user account with sudo access and switch to it.

useradd -c "John Doe" johndoe && passwd johndoe
usermod -aG wheel johndoe
su - johndoe

NOTE: Replace johndoe with your username.

Set up the timezone.

timedatectl list-timezones
sudo timedatectl set-timezone 'Region/City'

Ensure that your system is up to date.

sudo yum update -y

Install needed packages to finish this tutorial.

sudo yum install -y git wget curl vim unzip

Disable SELinux and Firewall.

sudo setenforce 0 ; sudo systemctl stop firewalld ; sudo systemctl disable firewalld

Install PHP

Setup the Webtatic YUM repo.

sudo rpm -Uvh https://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el7/webtatic-release.rpm

Install PHP, as well as the necessary PHP extensions.

sudo yum install -y php72w php72w-cli php72w-fpm php72w-common php72w-mysql php72w-curl php72w-json php72w-zip php72w-gd php72w-xml php72w-mbstring php72w-opcache php72w-pgsql

Check the version.

php --version

# PHP 7.2.16 (cli) (built: Mar 10 2019 21:22:49) ( NTS )
# Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
# Zend Engine v3.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies
#     with Zend OPcache v7.2.16, Copyright (c) 1999-2018, by Zend Technologies

Start and enable PHP-FPM.

sudo systemctl start php-fpm.service
sudo systemctl enable php-fpm.service

Install MariaDB and create a database

Install MariaDB.

sudo yum install -y mariadb-server

Check the version.

mysql --version
# mysql  Ver 15.1 Distrib 5.5.60-MariaDB, for Linux (x86_64) using readline 5.1

Start and enable MariaDB.

sudo systemctl start mariadb.service
sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service

Run mysql_secure installation to improve security and set the password for the root user.

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Log into MariaDB as the root user.

mysql -u root -p
# Enter password

Create a database and user that you will use for your installation of Attendize, and remember the credentials.

CREATE DATABASE dbname;
GRANT ALL ON dbname.* TO 'username' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit

Install and configure Nginx

Install Nginx.

sudo yum install -y nginx

Check the version.

nginx -v
# nginx version: nginx/1.12.2

Start and enable Nginx.

sudo systemctl start nginx.service
sudo systemctl enable nginx.service

Run sudo vim /etc/nginx/conf.d/attendize.conf and populate the file with the following configuration.

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    
    server_name example.com; # Check this
    root /var/www/attendize/public; # Check this

    index index.php;

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

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # Check this
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

Test the configuration.

sudo nginx -t

Reload Nginx.

sudo systemctl reload nginx.service

Install Composer

Install Composer globally.

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '48e3236262b34d30969dca3c37281b3b4bbe3221bda826ac6a9a62d6444cdb0dcd0615698a5cbe587c3f0fe57a54d8f5') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Check the version.

composer --version
# Composer version 1.8.5 2019-04-09 17:46:47

Install Attendize

Create a document root directory.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/attendize

Change ownership of the /var/www/attendize directory to johndoe.

sudo chown -R johndoe:johndoe /var/www/attendize

Navigate to the document root directory.

cd /var/www/attendize

Download the latest release of Attendize and unzip it.

wget https://github.com/Attendize/Attendize/archive/v1.2.0.zip
unzip v1.2.0.zip
rm v1.2.0.zip
mv Attendize-1.2.0/* . && mv Attendize-1.2.0/.* .
rmdir Attendize-1.2.0

Make a copy of the environment configuration file.

cp .env.example .env

Run composer to install the various libraries.

composer install

NOTE: If your system has less than 2GB memory, you may run into errors when running composer install command. To overcome this, configure a larger amount of swap memory.

Generate an application key.

php artisan key:generate

Change ownership of the /var/www/attendize directory to nginx.

sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /var/www/attendize

Run sudo vim /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf and set the user and group to nginx. Initially, they will be set to apache.

sudo vim /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf
# user = nginx
# group = nginx

Restart the PHP-FPM service.

sudo systemctl restart php-fpm.service

Navigate to http://example.com/install and you will see the installer screen. After following the on-screen instructions, Attendize will be installed.