Bobby Iliev

Posted on Jan 10, 2020 • Edited on Jan 13, 2020

How to install Microweber - the Open Source Drag and Drop Website Builder that is Disrupting the Industry

#opensource #laravel #ubuntu #javascript

Introduction

Microweber is a Drag and Drop website builder and a powerful next generation CMS. It's based on the PHP Laravel Framework. You can use Microweber to make any kind of website, online store, and blog. The Drag and Drop technology allows you to build your website without any technical knowledge.

Microweber is built on existing technologies and gives the developers and the users a single tool that makes the website creation process easier than before.

It empowers regular users and programmers to make websites with ease.

Some key features include:

No programing needed!
True WYSIWYG
Drag and drop editing
Out-of-the box eCommerce features

On the technical side, it is fully documented, it has multiple PHP template engines, it has a Powerful API and a lot more!

You can find the official Microweber Github repository here.

In this tutorial, we will install Microweber on an Ubuntu 18.04 server. I will use DigitalOcean Droplet to deploy an Ubuntu 18.04 Droplet.

For anyone who is not interested in the manual installation process, you could install Microweber with just a click of a button via the DigitalOcean Marketplace.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure that you have:

Ubuntu 18.04 server with at least 2GB of RAM
SSH access to the server

Installing LAMP

As Microweber is based on Laravel, we will go ahead and install Apache2, PHP 7 and MySQL.

First SSH to your server:

ssh root@your_server_ip

Then to get an updated version of the Ubuntu packages and their dependencies run:

sudo apt update -y

Once that is done, run the following to install Apache2, PHP 7 and all required modules along with MySQL:

sudo apt install apache2 apache2-utils curl mysql-server mysql-client php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql php-common php-mbstring php-xmlrpc php-soap php-gd php-xml php-mysql php-cli php-gd php-zip php-xml php-dev php-pear php-curl -y

One more thing that's required by Microweber is the Apache mod_rewrite, to enable that run:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

Finally restart Apache:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Installing Composer

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. It allows you to install and update libraries and packages for your PHP projects. In our, we will use Composer to install Microweber.

To keep things simple we will just go ahead and use apt to install Composer:

sudo apt install composer

That's it! Now we are ready to install Microweber via Composer!

Installing Microweber

For the sake of simplicity, we would not go ahead and create Apache virtual hosts, but we would use the default one. So first we would need to clear the content of the /var/www/html directory by deleting the default Apache index.html file:

sudo rm /var/www/html/index.html

Then we can go ahead and create the new Microweber project in the /var/www/html directory:

composer create-project microweber/microweber /var/www/html dev-master

This might take a while, but once the process completes, we might have to generate a new Laravel application key.

First go to the directory that we've just installed Microweber at:

cd /var/www/html

And then run the following artisan command to generate the key:

php artisan key:generate

Last but not least, make sure that Apache has read and write access to the /var/www/html directory:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/

Then we will go ahead and create a database as this would be required during the Microweber setup.

Configure MySQL

Let's start with securing our MySQL server:

mysql_secure_installation

Follow the process and set a MySQL root password. Then to access MySQL run:

mysql -u root -p

Enter the password that you've just setup during the MySQL secure installation process.

Next, we need to create a new database and user, to do that just execute the following queries:

CREATE DATABASE microweber_db;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON microweber_db.* TO 'microweber_user'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'SuperSecurePa55!';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

Make sure to use a strong password for your database user! Note down your database, password, and user and proceed to the next step where you will finalize the installation

Finalizing the Microweber Installation

Microweber comes with a nice installer. All you need to do is to open your website in a browser (i.e. http://example.com/). You would see a screen that allows you to initially set up your Microweber.

Follow the steps and complete the installation! Pick up a template and start exploring the powerful and intuitive features that this open source website builder provides!

Conclusion

Microweber is an amazing open source project and I am really amazed by their drag and drop functionality and the big variety of features that the builder comes with.

Let me know what you think!

Top comments (13)

Andrei Dascalu • Jan 11 '20

Hm, would be interesting if the need for programming weren't replaced by sysadmun skills.
Nowadays most frameworks and platforms offer a Dockerized quickstart.
Instead of installing (and presumably later maintaining) php/apache/mysql, just provide pre-built containers and simply install docker(and maybe git).

Bobby Iliev • Jan 11 '20

That is a really great idea for a contribution! I might try to build a Dockerfile and submit a PR.

But in the mean time you could also get it preinstalled on a Droplet here:

marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/...

Marc Philippe Beaujean • Jan 11 '20 • Edited

This is cool! In my opinion I could only see a serious business using tools like this if they are actually open source - really excited about stuff like this empowering more startups and faster development!

nksky • Mar 6 '21

Hi, I have followed your write-up, very well written. I am deploying this on my own server. After following all the steps, I try to access my site xxxxx.com I get a note in the corner "No input file specified."
Is there something I have missed or left out. Server running Ubuntu 20.04, PHP 7.4 tried both Composer V1 and V2.

Thanks