Pixelpost is a free and open-source, fully extensible photo blog application that is very simple and easy to use. It is developed for publishing photos on a chronological base.

Pixelpost has several requirements for its hosting environment. To run Pixelpost, you should have:   

• PHP version 4.3 or greater (w/ GD-lib)
• MySQL version 3.23.58 or newer
• Web Server (Apache or Nginx)

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Pixelpost and all of the requirements on a CentOS 7 Virtual Server

Login to your CentOS VPS as user root

ssh root@IP_Adress

and update all packages installed on your server

yum -y update

Next, install Apache web server

yum -y install httpd

Start the Apache web server and set it to start automatically on server boot

systemctl start httpd
systemctl enable httpd

Install PHP and a few PHP extensions

yum -y install php php-mysql php-gd

Pixelpost stores its information in a database, so we will install MariaDB server

yum -y install mariadb mariadb-server

After the installation, start the MariaDB server and set it to start automatically on system boot

systemctl start mariadb
systemctl enable mariadb

It is recommended to run the mysql_secure_installation script. This script will help you to improve the security of your MariaDB installation and set your MariaDB root password.

After that, you can login to the MariaDB server as user root and create a new user and an empty database for Pixelpost

mysql -u root -p

CREATE DATABASE pixelpost;
CREATE USER 'pixelpostuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `pixelpost`.* TO 'pixelpostuser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

Don’t forget to replace ‘PASSWORD’ with an actual strong password.

Now, go to Pixelpost’s official website and download the latest stable release of Pixelpost to your server. Currently, it is version 1.7.3

wget http://www.pixelpost.org/releases/latest.zip

Create a new directory for Pixelpost in the document root directory on your server

mkdir /var/www/html/pixelpost

and unzip the zip archive to the newly created directory

unzip latest.zip -d /var/www/html/pixelpost

Set the correct ownership to the pixelpost directory

chown -R apache: /var/www/html/phpwcms

Now we will create an Apache virtual host, so we can access Pixelpost with a domain name. Using your favorite text editor, create a ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file with the following content:

IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf

Create a ‘vhosts.d/’ directory

mkdir /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/

and create the virtual host with the following content

vim /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/yourdomain.com.conf


ServerAdmin [email protected]
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/pixelpost/"
ServerName yourdomain.com
ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com
ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log"
CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined


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

Save the new configuration file and restart the Apache web server for the changes to take effect.

systemctl restart httpd

Now, we have to complete the Pixelpost installation through a web browser. Open your favorite web browser and navigate it to http://yourdomain.com/admin/index.php and follow the on-screen instruction.

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