• Requirements
  • Browser requirements
  • Server requirements
• Log in to your server
• Download the source code from GitHub
• Set permissions
• Create the database
• Run the guided installer

Requirements

Browser requirements

• An Internet or intranet connection to the server (e.g. Ethernet, Wi-Fi, mobile data)
• The latest version of any of these modern HTML5 web browsers, with Javascript enabled:
  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Apple Safari
  • Brave
  • Opera
  • Google Chrome
  • Microsoft Edge
  • (Internet Explorer is no longer supported)

Server requirements

• Any of these 64-bit operating systems:
  • Linux (recommended, using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)
  • BSD
  • macOS
  • Windows
• Any of these webserver applications:
  • Caddy (recommended, using PHP-FPM)
  • Nginx (recommended, using PHP-FPM)
  • Apache
  • Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)
  • Built-in PHP webserver (for development and evaluation)
• PHP 8.2 (64-bit) or later
  • With the following extensions enabled:
    • curl
    • dom
    • gd
    • json
    • mailparse
    • mbstring
    • mysqli
    • openssl
    • pcre
    • session
    • simplexml
    • spl
    • yaml
    • xml
    • tidy (recommended)
    • gmp (recommended)
    • memcached (optional)
    • redis (optional)
  • With these php.ini settings:
    • file_uploads = On
    • memory_limit = 128M (or higher)
    • upload_max_filesize = 32M (or higher)
    • post_max_size = 32M (or higher)
• Any of these database servers:
  • MySQL 8.0 or later
  • MariaDB 10.5 or later
  • Amazon Aurora 3.x or later

Log in to your server

The following general instructions assume that you have console access to a Linux-based server that meets the above requirements. You should already have a webserver, database, and PHP installed before proceeding.

You can follow one of these guides to set up a new server:

• Installing Cerb on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with Nginx and PHP-FPM

Download the source code from GitHub

Navigate to your website's document directory on the filesystem. The directory will usually be named something like htdocs, httpdocs, public_html, or www.

cd /path/to/example.com/httpdocs

When deploying Cerb on a production server you should use Git to manage the project files. This provides many useful capabilities:

• Quickly upgrade by just fetching files that have changed since your last update.
• See the local changes that you have made to any project files.
• Easily reset files back to their default condition.
• See what changes would occur before performing an upgrade.
• Continuously merge your local changes with our future updates.

You won't need to download the entire project again after your initial installation. You also won't have to hassle with copying your framework.config.php configuration file or storage directory when upgrading, or repeating any of your custom modifications to the source code.

You can download Cerb into a specific directory with a single command:

git clone git://github.com/cerb/cerb-release.git cerb

You would access Cerb at a URL with a base path like https://example.com/cerb. You can change the last argument above to whatever path you want: support, helpdesk, etc.

To download Cerb into the root of your domain instead, use:

git clone git://github.com/cerb/cerb-release.git .

This results in a URL without a base path, like https://support.example.com/

Set permissions

Next, we need to make sure that Cerb's files are owned by the webserver's user and group. The default user and group are both www-data when using Apache or Nginx on Ubuntu. If you're using something different, you should consult your configuration for the proper values.

You only need to enable write access to the webserver in two locations:

• framework.config.php This is your configuration file.
• storage/ This is where any data unique to your installation is stored: third-party plugins, attachments, temporary files, caches, etc.

Give ownership of all the files to the webserver daemon using chown, and make the two locations above writable using chmod:

cd cerb
chown -R www-data:www-data .
chmod -R u+w framework.config.php storage

You must use your own user and group for www-data in the example above.

Create the database

Create a new MySQL database using the console or your favorite GUI tool.

From the MySQL console, you can issue the following SQL statements:

CREATE DATABASE cerb CHARACTER SET utf8mb4;

CREATE USER cerb@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'secret_password';

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON cerb.* TO cerb@localhost;

Substitute your own database name and login in place of cerb, and replace secret_password with something that's actually a secret. If you're connecting to a remote database, change @localhost to the network address of the webserver where you'll be connecting from.

If you're concerned about granting ALL PRIVILEGES, the minimum required privileges for the database user are: SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, ALTER, DROP, INDEX, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES.

Run the guided installer

Cerb has a guided installer that verifies your requirements, initializes the database, and walks you through the initial configuration of the software.