In this tutorial, we will show you how to install XMB forum on a CentOS 7 VPS with Apache, PHP and MySQL installed on it.
The eXtreme Message Board (XMB) forum is an open source software written in PHP and designed by The XMB Group. This tutorial was tested and written for a CentOS VPS, but it should work on any RPM based Linux distribution.

This install guide assumes that Apache, MySQL and PHP are already installed and configured on your virtual server. At the time of writing this tutorial, the latest version of XMB forum is 1.9.11 and it requires:

• Nginx web server or Apache web server >= 2.0 compiled with mod_rewrite module and with the following directives allowed: RewriteEngine, RewriteBase, RewriteCond and RewriteRule;
• PHP 5.0 or higher is recommended;
• MySQL 5.0 or higher installed on your virtual server (MariaDB is also supported).

Let’s start with the installation. Make sure your server OS packages are fully up-to-date:

yum clean all 
yum update

Download the latest version of the eXtreme Message Board forum software available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/xmb-forum2/files/latest/download and extract it to a directory on your server accessible by the web server (e.g. /var/www/html/your-domain.com/) using the following commands:

cd /opt/ 
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/xmb-forum2/XMB-1.9.11.13.zip
unzip XMB-1.9.11.13.zip
mv XMB-1.9.11.13/ /var/www/html/your-domain.com

Do not forget to replace your-domain.com with your actual domain name.
Next, create a new MySQL database for XMB forum to use and assign a user to it with full permissions:

mysql -u root -p
mysql> SET GLOBAL sql_mode='';
mysql> CREATE USER xmb;
mysql> CREATE DATABASE xmbdb;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON xmbdb.* TO 'xmb'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit

Do not forget to replace ‘your-password’ with a strong password.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. Edit the main Apache configuration file (/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf) and add the following line at the end if it is not already done so:

vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

IncludeOptional conf.d/*.conf

Then, create a new Apache configuration file on your virtual server:

touch /etc/httpd/conf.d/your-domain.com.conf

Edit the ‘your-domain.com.conf’ configuration file:

vi vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/your-domain.com.conf

and add the following lines to it:

ServerAdmin [email protected]
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/your-domain.com/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted

ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/your-domain.com-error_log"
CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/your-domain.com-access_log" combined

Set the proper file permissions for the Apache Web Server to write to the XMB forum document root (‘/var/www/html/your-domain.com’) directory:

sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/your-domain.com/

Restart the Apache web server for the changes to take effect:

service apache2 restart

Open your favorite web browser, navigate to http://your-domain.com/files/install/ , start the installation process and follow the easy instructions:

Click ‘Install XMB 1.9.11’, accept the license agreement, enter the database connection settings:
Database Name: xmbdb
Database Username: xmb
Database Password: *your-password*
Then, modify other forum settings if needed, add a valid email account login credentials to the ‘XMB E-Mail Settings’ section and click on the ‘Configure’ button, upload the code to a file named ‘config.php’.

cd /var/www/html/your-domain.com/files/
mv config.php config.php.bak
vi config.php

Add the code to the config.php file.
Change the ownership of config.php file:

chown apache:apache config.php

Click ‘close Window’, then click on the ‘Next Step’ button and on the next page create an administrator user account, and finally click on the ‘Begin installation’ button.
If the installation process completed successfully, open http://your-domain.com/files/misc.php?action=login and log in to the administration back-end of XMB forum using the newly created admin account.

That is it. The XMB forum installation is now complete

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