Installing Joomla 3.x to your joom.dev Ubuntu 16.04 development server.

Watch the video on how to intsall Joomla into your Ubuntu 12.04 virtual host. Download the PDF file explaining how to install Joomla into your Ubuntu 12.04 virtual host. I don't think you can technically call Joomla! a development tool, but I am putting it in this section nonetheless. After all, you cannot develop Joomla! extensions without it.

Step 1 – Downloading the Joomla! 3.x CMS

Point your browser to http://www.joomla.org. At the very top right of the page is a Download button. Click this button to get to the main download page for Joomla. At the time of this writing you have the option of downloading either the full version of Joomla or an upgrade version of Joomla. Since we will be doing a full new install we want to click the full version on Joomla. At the time of this writing it is version 3.5.1. This could be a newer version by the time you read this. If so, just download the newest full package version. Click the button and save the file, keeping a note of where you save the file to. If you have not changed the default behavior of Firefox, this will be in the Downloads folder under your home directory.

Step 2 – Extracting the Joomla 3.x CMS files

When the file has finished downloading, open a terminal with [CTRL][ALT][T] and navigate to the folder in which you saved the Joomla! 3.x zip file. To extract the archive we will be using a program called unzip. You can check to see if you have unzip installed by issuing the command which unzip. This command will either return the path to the unzip program or nothing at all, meaning it just give you a command prompt. If this is the case you can install unzip from the command prompt with sudo apt install unzip. However, unzip should be installed by default on an Ubuntu 16.04 installation.

If you are following this series, recall that we created a folder on our desktop called joomdev. This folder is being pointed to by apache and is used using a virtual host called joom.dev. In this way, if we open the browser and type http://joom.dev, Apache will look in this folder for the request. If your document root folder is different, make note of where you have it located and the name of the folder itself. It is required for the next task. The general form of the unzip program when you wish to extract to a specific folder is unzip file.zip -d /destination/directory. With the preliminary stuff out of the way, we extract the file to our document root folder with the command unzip Joomla_3.5.1-Stable-Full_Package.zip -d ~/Desktop/joomdev and press the [ENTER] key. At the time of this tutorial, Joomla! 3.5.1 was available, your file that you downloaded may be different. Keep that in mind when you extract. The easiest and fastest way to enter the filename is to type the first few letters and press the [TAB] key. This will use command completion to finish the filename for you. With the files extracted to our virtual host's document root, we can move on.

Step 3 – Creating a database for Joomla!

At this point we need to create a database for Joomla! to use. Open your web browser and point it to http://joom.dev/phpmyadmin. You should be presented with the phpMyAdmin login screen. If this link does not work, try http://localhost/phpmyadmin. If phpMyAdmin opens with some errors about deprecated Methods and other Warnings, don’t worry. If you recall, we turned on all the error reporting we could and because phpMyAdmin is using some methods that will be deprecated in future releases it is giving us a warning. So for phpMyAdmin we can ignore this. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click the Ignore All button. Then refresh your browser by hitting the F5 key. Remember when you set up your LAMP server, you had to supply the MySQL server a password. Enter root in for the username and the password you created for MySQL in the password field and click the go button. Now that you are logged into phpMyAdmin, look at the menu at the top of the screen. The first entry is Databases. Click this entry to open the Databases screen. Very near the top of the screen you will see a box where you may enter the name of a database to create. Enter joomla3 in the box. Leave the collation drop down as it is to accept the default collation for the server. Finally click the create button. If all went well you should get a dialog pop up that tells you that the database was created, and you should see joomla3 database listed on the left side of the screen with the other databases that exist.

A note on security. If you are setting up a Web Server, MySQL and Joomla! on a public facing address, You would ALWAYS want to create a specific user and password for the Joomla! database, granting that user the permissions needed to get the job done. Again, I will reiterate the point that it is assumed that the development environment is not connected to the Internet and used in a local context only.

Step 4 – Running the Joomla! Installer

We are now ready to run the Joomla! Installer. Point your browser to http://joom.dev/. You will be presented with the first setup screen for Joomla! The very first thing is to select your language. I will be using the default “English (United States)” for mine. Below that is a header that read Main Configuration, Here you will fill in the site name, I am using “Joom 3.x Dev” for this field, you can use whatever you like. You can place any description of the site you like in the Description box below the site name. Next are Admin Email, Username and password. Fill these out as appropriate. Last is a toggle button to allow you to set the initial state of the website to offline. The default is no. If you turn this on, you will be required to enter your username and password to see the frontend of the site. I will leave this option set to no. Finally click the NEXT button at the top right of the screen.

Now you are presented with the Database configuration screen. For database type, leave it set to MySQLi. The hostname will be localhost. The username will be root. The password will be whatever you set it as when you installed MySQL when installing LAMP. Enter that password here. Below that you enter the name of the database we created in step 3 above, I will enter joomla3 in this box. Lastly, it asks about a database table prefix. What is listed there will be 5 random character with an underscore '_' character. Feel free to change this if you like, but the default will probably be just fine. The last option about backing up the database does not matter to us. We created a new database and there isn't anything to backup. Finally click the next button again.

We are at the last configuration screen. At this point you need only decide if you want sample data to be installed. If you have never used Joomla! Before, you probably should install some sample data so you can get an idea of what things look like on the front and back ends of the CMS. Perhaps the Learn Joomla English sample data. If you mouse over the text, you will be given a description of the data it will install. If you decide you don't like it, you can drop the database, empty the folder and install it all again. Finally click the install button at the top right of the screen.

When the installer finishes, you will need to remove the installation folder. You can easily do this by clicking the yellow [Remove Installation Folder] button. Finally, you can visit the front or back end of your newly installed site by clicking the [Site] or [Administrator] buttons on the screen.

To access the front-end of your site, just enter http://joom.dev in the address bar of your browser. To access the administrative back-end enter http://joom.dev/administrator in your browsers address bar.

That's it!!! Joomla is now installed and ready to go!!!