How to Install Open Real Estate on Ubuntu 16.04

Open Real Estate is a free and open source software application that can be used for building websites of real estate agencies and realtors. Open Real Estate enables you to use multiple languages and currencies on the real estate website making it easy to use for users from different countries. Open Real Estate comes with built-in SEO features that provide flexible settings of the site for better indexing by search machines and use of SEF URL. It provides simple, user friendly and easy to use web interface to manage from a central location.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to install the Open Real Estate software on Ubuntu 16.04.

Requirements

• A server running Ubuntu 16.04.
• A non-root user with sudo privileges.

Geting Started

Before starting, you will need to install necessary packages and update the system repository with the latest version. You can do this using the following command:

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Once the repository is up-to-date, restart the system to apply all the changes. Then, install the required packages with the following command:

sudo apt-get install nano curl wget unzip -y

Install LAMP Server

Open Real Estate runs on Apache web server, written in PHP and uses MariaDB to store their data. So you will need to install LAMP server to your system. You can install LAMP server with required PHP libraries using the following command:

sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php7.0 mariadb-server mariadb-client php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-mysql php7.0-gd php7.0-curl -y

Once all the packages are installed, start Apache and MariaDB service and enable them to start on boot using the following command:

sudo systemctl start apache2
sudo systemctl enable apache2
sudo systemctl start mysql
sudo systemctl enable mysql

Configure MariaDB

By default, MariaDB is not secure. So you will need to secure it first. You can secure it by using the mysql_secure_installation script.

sudo mysql_secure_installation

This script will set the root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB as shown below:

Set root password? [Y/n] y
Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Once the MariaDB is secured, create a database for Open Real Estate.

First, log in to the MariaDB console with the following command:

mysql -u root -p

You will be prompt for a password, enter your root password and create a database for Open Real Estate:

MariaDB [(none)]> create database openrealestatedb;

Next, create a user for Open Real Estate and grantall privileges to the Open Real Estate with the following command:

MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON openrealestatedb.* TO ‘user’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

Next, flush the privileges with the following command:

MariaDB [(none)]> flush privileges;

Finally, exit from the MariaDB console using the following command:

MariaDB [(none)]> quit

Download Open Real Estate

First, you will need to download the latest version of the Open Real Estate from their official website.

You can download it with the following command:

wget http://open-real-estate.info/files/OpenRealEstateV1.22.2_en.zip

Once the download is completed, extract it to the apache root directory:

sudo unzip OpenRealEstateV1.22.2_en.zip -d /var/www/html/openrealestate

Next, give proper ownership to the openrealestate directory using the following command:

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

Configure Apache for Open Real Estate

Next, you will need to create an Apache virtual host directive for Open Real Estate. You can do this with the following command:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/openrealestate.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin [email protected]
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/openrealestate/
ServerName www.example.com
<Directory /var/www/html/openrealestate/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/openrealestate-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/openrealestate-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Save and close the file when you are finished, then enable virtual host directive with the following command:

sudo a2ensite openrealestate

Finally, restart Apache web server to apply all the changes.

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Now, open your web browser and type the URL http://example.com. You will be redirected to the Open Real Estate page. Complete required steps to finish the installation.