How to Install Koel on CentOS 7

Koel is a simple web-based personal audio streaming app written in Vue on the client side and Laravel on the server side. Koel source code is hosted on Github. This guide will show you how to install Koel on a fresh CentOS 7 Vultr instance by utilizing PHP, MariaDB, Nginx, Node.js, Yarn and Composer.

Requirements

• PHP version 5.6.4 or greater, with the following extensions:
• OpenSSL
• PDO
• Mbstring
• Tokenizer
• XML
• MariaDB
• Latest stable version of Node.js with yarn
• Composer
• Nginx

Before you begin

Check the CentOS version.

cat /etc/centos-release
# CentOS Linux release 7.5.1804 (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 necessary packages.

sudo yum install -y wget curl vim git && sudo yum groupinstall -y "Development Tools"

For simplicity, 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 and required PHP extensions.

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

Check the version.

php --version
# PHP 7.2.7 (cli) (built: Jul  1 2018 08:22:47) ( NTS )

Start and enable the PHP-FPM service.

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

Install MariaDB and setup a database

Create the repo for MariaDB. Open sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/MariaDB.repo and populate it with the following.

[mariadb]
name = MariaDB
baseurl = https://yum.mariadb.org/10.2/centos7-amd64
gpgkey=https://yum.mariadb.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-MariaDB
gpgcheck=1

Save and exit, then install MariaDB.

sudo yum install -y MariaDB-server MariaDB-client

Check the version.

mysql --version
# mysql  Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.2.16-MariaDB, for Linux (x86_64) using readline 5.1

Start and enable the MariaDB service.

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

Run mysql_secure_installation to improve security and set the password for the MariaDB root user.

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Connect to MariaDB as the root user.

mysql -u root -p
# Enter password:

Create an empty MariaDB database and user for Koel, and remember the credentials.

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

Install and configure Nginx

Install Nginx.

sudo yum install -y nginx

Check the version.

sudo nginx -v
# nginx version: nginx/1.12.2

Start and enable Nginx.

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

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

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name example.com;
  root /var/www/koel;
  index index.php;


  # Allow only index.php, robots.txt, and those start with public/ or api/ or remote
  if ($request_uri !~ ^/$|index\.php|robots\.txt|api/|public/|remote) {
    return 404;
  }

  location /media/ {
    internal;
    # A 'X-Media-Root' should be set to media_path settings from upstream
    alias $upstream_http_x_media_root;
   }

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

   location ~ \.php$ {
     try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
     fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
     fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED $document_root$fastcgi_path_info;
     fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
     fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
     fastcgi_index index.php;
     fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
     fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
     include fastcgi_params;
   }
}

Test the Nginx configuration.

sudo nginx -t

Reload Nginx.

sudo systemctl reload nginx.service

Install Node.js

Install Node.js.

curl --silent --location https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo bash -
sudo yum -y install nodejs

Check the version.

node --version
# v8.11.3

Install Yarn

Install the Yarn package manager.

curl --silent --location https://dl.yarnpkg.com/rpm/yarn.repo | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/yarn.repo
sudo yum install -y yarn

Check the version.

yarn --version
# 1.9.2

Install Composer

Install Composer.

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('sha384', 'composer-setup.php') === '93b54496392c062774670ac18b134c3b3a95e5a5e5c8f1a9f115f203b75bf9a129d5daa8ba6a13e2cc8a1da0806388a8') { 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 1.6.5 2018-05-04 11:44:59

Install Koel

Create an empty document root folder where Koel will be installed.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/koel

Navigate to the document root folder.

cd /var/www/koel

Change ownership of the /var/www/koel folder to user johndoe.

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

Clone the Koel repository to it, checkout the latest tagged release and install its dependencies.

git clone https://github.com/phanan/koel.git .
git checkout v3.7.2
composer install

Run php artisan koel:init command to setup the database and admin account.

php artisan koel:init

Run vim .env and set APP_URL to your URL.

APP_URL=http://example.com

Run yarn install to compile and install front-end dependencies.

yarn install

NOTE: If you run out of memory, you will receive an error message. To avoid that, you can temporarily stop MariaDB, Nginx and PHP-FPM services, or configure swap memory, if the first solution does not help.

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

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

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

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

Restart PHP-FPM.

sudo systemctl restart php-fpm.service

The setup is now complete. To continue, open your domain in a web browser and you will see a login page. Then, login by entering your admin account credentials that you have previously created.