How to Install Mautic Marketing Automation Tool on Ubuntu 16.04

Mautic is an open source self-hosted marketing automation tool for everyone. You can use it to grow up your business or community, monitor your website, create landing pages, create a campaign for your business, manage contacts, and even send marketing emails.

In this tutorial, I will show you step-by-step how to install Mautic Marketing Automation Platform using Ubuntu 16.04. It’s a web-based application, and we will be using the LEMP stack for our installation guide.

Prerequisites

• Ubuntu 16.04
• Root privileges

What we will do

1. Install Nginx
2. Install and configure MariaDB
3. install and configure PHP-FPM
4. Download Mautic
5. Configure Nginx virtual host for Mautic
6. Mautic Web-based installation
7. Testing

Step 1 – Install Nginx

Mautic is a web-based marketing automation tool, and we will be using the Nginx web server for our Mautic installation.

Login to your server machine, and then update and upgrade all packages.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Now install Nginx using the apt command below.

sudo apt install nginx

After the installation is complete, start the nginx service and enable it to launch every time at system boot.

systemctl start nginx
systemctl enable nginx

The Nginx web server has been installed on to the Ubuntu 16.04 system – check it using the netstat command.

netstat -plntu

You should get the default HTTP port 80 on the list with ‘LISTEN’ state status.

Step 2 – Install and Configure MariaDB

Mautic offers support only for the MySQL database with min version 5.5.3. For this guide, we will be using the mariadb-server 10.0 based on MySQL 5.5.

Install the mariadb database using the following apt command.

sudo apt install mariadb-server mariadb-client -y

After the installation is complete, start the mariadb service and enable it to launch every time at system boot.

systemctl start mysql
systemctl enable mysql

Now, we need to create a new database and user for mautic. We will create new database named ‘mautic‘, user ‘mauticuser‘ with password ‘aqwe123‘.

Login to the MySQL shell using the following mysql command.

mysql -u root -p

Create a new database and user using the following queries.

create database mautic;
grant all on mautic.* to ‘mauticuser’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘aqwe123’;
flush privileges;
exit;

MariaDB database has been installed, and the database for Mautic installation has been created.

Step 3 – Install and Configure PHP-FPM

Mautic requires at-least PHP 5.6.19 for the installation. So for this guide, we will be using PHP-FPM 7.0 for our mautic installation.

Install PHP and PHP-FPM (with all required extensions) using the apt command below.

sudo apt install -y php7.0-fpm php7.0-mbstring php7.0-xml php7.0-mysql php7.0-common php7.0-gd php7.0-json php7.0-cli php7.0-curl php7.0-zip php7.0-xml php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-imap php7.0-intl

After the installation is complete, we need to configure the php.ini files for FPM and CLI configurations.

Go to the ‘/etc/php/7.0’ directory and edit the ‘php.ini’ file under ‘fpm’ directory.

cd /etc/php/7.0/
vim fpm/php.ini

Uncomment the ‘date.timezone’ line and give the with ‘UTC‘ for timezone configuration.

date.timezone = "UTC"

Now uncomment the ‘cgi.fix_pathinfo’ line and change the value to ‘0’.

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0

Save and exit.

Next, edit the ‘php.ini’ file under the ‘cli’ directory.

vim cli/php.ini

Uncomment the ‘date.timezone’ line and give the value with ‘UTC’ for PHP timezone configuration.

date.time = "UTC"

Next, uncomment the ‘cgi.fix_pathinfo’ line, and change the value to ‘0’.

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0

Save and exit.

Now start the PHP-FPM service and enable it to launch every time at system boot.

systemctl restart php7.0-fpm
systemctl enable php7.0-fpm

The PHP and PHP-FPM installation and configuration for our Mautic installation has been completed. Check it using the netstat command as shown below.

netstat -pl | grep php

And you should get the result as shown below.

Step 4 – Download Mautic

Goto the ‘/var/www/’ directory and download the mautic source code using the following wget command.

cd /var/www
wget https://www.mautic.org/download/latest

Extract the ‘latest’ file with the unzip command to the ‘mautic’ directory.

unzip latest -d mautic/

Note: If you don’t have the unzip command on your system, install it using the command below.

sudo apt install unzip -y

Now change the owner and group for the ‘mautic’ directory to ‘www-data’.

chown -R www-data:www-data mautic/

Mautic is downloaded to the ‘/var/www/mautic’ directory.

Step 5 – Configure Nginx Virtual Host for Mautic

For this guide, we’re using Nginx instead of the Apache web server. In this step, we will configure the Nginx virtual host for the mautic installation.

Go to the ‘/etc/nginx’ directory and create a new file named ‘mautic’ under the ‘sites-available’ directory.

cd /etc/nginx/
vim sites-available/mautic

Paste the following mautic nginx configuration there.

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;     
    server_name mautic.hakase-labs.co;
     
    root /var/www/mautic;
    index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
     
    location / {
      try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
    location ~ .php$ {
      include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
      fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
    }
    location ~* ^/index.php {
      fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+.php)(/.+)$;
      fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
      fastcgi_index index.php;
      fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
      include fastcgi_params;
      fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
      fastcgi_buffers 256 16k;
      fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
      fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
    }
}

Save and exit.

Now activate the ‘mautic’ virtual host and check it using the ‘nginx -t’ command as shown below.

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/mautic /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
nginx -t

Make sure there is no error, and restart the webserver.

systemctl restart nginx

Nginx virtual host configuration for mautic has been completed.

Step 6 – Mautic Web-Based Installation

Open your web browser and visit the mautic domain name, mine is http://mautic.hakase-labs.co.

You will be redirected to the mautic installation page. Make sure all the extensions and configuration is error-free as shown below.

Click ‘Next Step‘ button to continue.

Now you will see the page about the database configuration. Type your database name, database user, and password as shown below.

And click the ‘Next Step‘ button.

Now we need to create the new admin account for Mautic. Type your admin user, email, and password.

Click the ‘Next Step‘ button.

For the email configuration, you can choose one option, or you can configure it later.

Click the ‘Next Step‘ button again.

Now you will get to see the admin login page. Type your admin user and password and click the ‘Login‘ button.

And now you’ll be able to see the Mautic admin dashboard.

The installation of the Mautic marketing automation tool on Ubuntu 16.04 with Nginx webserver has been completed successfully.

Reference