How to Install phpBB on Cloud9 IDE

phpBB is a free and open source community CMS, you can use it to create an online community/forum for your hobby, school or sports team. As with many content management systems, you don’t have to know any programming language to start and manage your portal.

This post will present a step by step guide on how to install phpBB for free on Cloud9 for development purposes, please note that it’s not advisable to install a Production version of Piwik on Cloud9 as the free tier isn’t designed for that intended purpose. Now, and without further ado let’s dive into the tutorial.

Prerequisite

First, you’ll need to sign-up for the free version of Cloud9.

Installation

Step One

After signing up and confirming your email, you’ll be directed to your dashboard, just click on the “create a new workspace” tab.

Step Two

You’ll be directed to a new window where you should configure your workspace, select the “php” option and then create the workspace.

Step Three

You’ll then be directed to your workspace, in the terminal just clone the latest release of phpBB using “wget”, at the time of writing this post the command should be as follow;

wget https://www.phpbb.com/files/release/phpBB-3.2.0.zip

Step Four

After the download is complete, we’ve to unzip the downloaded file using the following command;

unzip phpbb*

Step Five

Now you need to move all of the content of the downloaded folder to the main directory, in my case move the content from “php” to “trial”.

Step Six

After the unzip is complete just click on the “Run Project” arrow, then click on “Preview”, the installation window will appear in a browser-like window on the side of your screen.

Step Seven

In the first installation window, just hit the “install” tab from the menu as seen in the screenshot below.

Step Eight

In the next step, the installation will inform you about the pre-installation requirements, click on the “Install” tab.

Step Nine

In the following step, you should create the username and password that you’ll later use to login to your portal.

Step Ten

In the following step, you should enter the database credentials, use the ones in the screenshot below; Database Server “0.0.0.0”, Login “root”, Database Name “c9”. Then you shall be directed to a new window that will inform you that a database table was created successfully.

Step Eleven

In the following step, you should configure the server, for the sake of this installation just leave everything as is and hit the “Submit” tab.

Step Twelve

In the following step, you should configure the email, for the sake of this installation just leave everything as is and hit the “Submit” tab, of course in a production installation you should configure it.

Step Thirteen

In the final step, you just hit the “Submit” tab and the installation will proceed.

Step Fourteen

Now, the installation is complete and you should be prompted by a new window informing you that, to visit the portal just go to your root directory (easier repeat step six).

Congratulations, now you have a fully functional installation of phpBB on Cloud9, as it’s been advised above this installation should be for development purposes only and not for production.