How to Install Vtiger CRM on Ubuntu 14.04 VPS

Let’s quickly show you how to install Vtiger crm on Ubuntu 14.04 VPS. Vtiger is one a very popular open source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software designed for both small and mid-sized business organizations for use in the management of customers, sales, leads, prospects, support, marketing as well as inventory activities. It’s entirely web based and runs conveniently on a LAMP application stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP).

In this short tutorial, we’ll show you how you can easily and quickly install Vtiger CRM on Ubuntu 14.04 VPS (Virtual Private Server). We will be doing this installation on our OVZ VPS 1000 VPS Hosting plan which provides the following resources:

• 1 Core
• 1 GB RAM
• 30 GB Disk
• 1 TB Bandwidth
• 1 IPV4 Address

The VPS is already provisioned with Ubuntu 14.04 and we’ll go through the step-by-step process to install Vtiger CRM on Ubuntu 14.04. However, you should be able to follow these exact instructions to install Vtiger CRM on Ubuntu 14.04 at any VPS or Dedicated Server of your choice hosted by any other VPS or Dedicated Server provider.

Step 1: Check and Update Ubuntu

The first thing to do is to log into your VPS via SSH using a SSH client such as PuTTy as the root user.

Once logged in, run the following command confirm the Ubuntu version installed and make sure it’s 14.04:

The above command, will give you an output similar to:

Next is to get all system updates and update the server to make sure it’s up to date with all necessary and latest software dependencies. So let’s run the following command:

Once you run the above command, wait for a few seconds/minutes for Ubuntu to do its thing. You may get a prompt such as the one below, simply type “y” or “Y” and hit the “Enter” key.

Step 2: Install & Secure MySQL Database

Time to install MySQL database since we’re working on a bare metal VPS with only the operating system (in this case Ubuntu) installed. So let’s run the following command to install MySQL database:

You may get a prompt asking for some extra, suggested or new packages to be installed as shown in the image below, simply type “y” or “Y” and hit the “Enter” key.

Watch out for a prompt (like the one below) asking you to set a password for the MySQL administrative “root” user. This is not mandatory but we suggest you create one for security purposes. For this tutorial, we set the password to: “myAdmin?16” (without the quotes):

When MySQL database is completely installed, you should get something similar to the image below displayed on your SSH console:

Security is important, so we need to secure our MySQL installation by running the following command:

Keep an eye for a prompt for the MySQL password you set during installation, enter the password and hit the Enter key. You’ll be prompted if you want to change the root password, type in “n” to continue. Below is a screen capture of the questions you’ll be asked, you can enter the same responses as we did:

Initialize the data directory for the MySQL installation by running the following command:

Check to make sure MySQL is up and running by running the following command:

You should see the following output if MySQL is up and running:

Step 3: Create a MySQL Database to install Vtiger CRM on Ubuntu

So in Step 2, we installed and secured our MySQL database as well as made sure it was up and running smoothly. Now, let’s create a database to install Vtiger CRM on Ubuntu.

The first thing to do is log into our MySQL installation as root by running the following command:

When prompted for the root password, enter the password you created during MySQL installation and hit the “Enter” key. Once logged in, you’ll see something similar to the image below:

We’re going to create the database, grant privileges to root user and flush privileges. First, we run this command to create the database:

You’ll get a confirmation informing that the query was ok and 1 row was affect. Good! Next, we’ll grant privileges by running the following command:

Note, we used ‘myAdmin?16’ which is the password we created. If you used something different for your password, that use what you created. Next we’ll flush the grant privileges which simply tells the server to reload the grant tables, by running the following command:

So we’re done, it’s time to exit the mysql > prompt by typing in the exit command:

Step 4: Install Vtiger CRM on Ubuntu

It’s now time to install Vtiger CRM on Ubuntu. So let’s go ahead and set up a directory/folder where the Vtiger software will be installed. We’ll call this directory/folder “crm”. Running the following command:

Navigate into the newly created directory/folder by running the following command:

Now, let’s download the latest version (as of this point of writing) of Vtiger by running the following command:

Once the download is complete, let’s unzip it by running the following command:

The unzipped files will be located in a directory/folder called “vtigercrm“, so we need to move everything in it into our current folder which is “/var/www/html/crm/” by running this command:

Proceed ahead and remove the directory/folder “vtigercrm” and zip file “vtigercrm6.4.0.tar.gz” since we won’t be needing them:

Assign appropriate owner to the “crm” directory/folder as well as files and directories/folders under it:

It’s time to get the Vtiger install ready to be served on the web. This requires creating a virtual host directive for the domain Vtiger will run on. Let’s begin by creating an empty file called crm.conf:

We will now enable the site:

Open the crm.conf file and paste the following by running the following command:

Then, paste the following text in it (instead of using “demo2.dailyrazor.com” as in this case, use your own domain name or whatever url you’ll be accessing your installation from):

Save the file and exit the editor. Let’s re-start the Apache HTTP server so the changes can be implemented:

We’ll need to make some minor changes to the PHP setting of the server, so let’s open the php.ini file:

Make the following adjustments to the file and save it: