Meet CentOS Web Panel – a free web hosting control panel.
CentOS Web Panel (CWP) can help you to install LAMP or LEMP stack easily. It’s a free solution and works on CentOS.
If you are looking to host CMS like WordPress, Joomla, etc, or a PHP-based application where you need a web server, database, emails, monitoring, and security then you have two options.
- You get the Cloud VM and install every software manually. This can be time-consuming and you need a little bit of sysadmin skills.
- The easy way – you get the Cloud VM and install CWP. And, then you install the required software through a GUI. It will take a lot less time than doing it manually.
CWP lets you install more than 50 software/components and some of the popular ones are as below.
- Web Stack – Apache, Nginx, Varnish
- App Stack – PHP-FPM, MySQL, PostgreSQL, phpMyAdmin
- Security – TLS certificates, CSF firewall, Mod Security with OWASP rules
- DNS & Email – DNS server, MailBoxes, AntiSpam, Postfix
- Monitoring – server metrics like CPU, File System, Memory
- File manager
- Crontab
Overall it looks promising to host PHP-based applications. Let’s install CWP to see how it looks like.
Installing CWP on CentOS
The following demonstration is done on Kamatera VM.
- Login to CentOS 7.x server with the root or account with sudo privilege
- Run the following command to update YUM and install CWP
yum -y install wget
yum -y update
wget http://centos-webpanel.com/cwp-el7-latest
sh cwp-el7-latestIt’ll take a few minutes to install all the necessary components. And, once done, you should get an installation confirmation.
#############################
# CWP Installed #
#############################
Go to CentOS WebPanel Admin GUI at http://SERVER_IP:2030/
http://167.71.1x1.xx:2030
SSL: https://167.71.1x1.xx:2031and, asking to reboot the server which you can do as below.
shutdown -r nowAs you can see above, CWP listens in 2030 (HTTP) and 2031 (HTTPS). Let’s try to access the web panel by accessing https://serverip:2031. You can use the username as root and its password and after login, you should see something like this.
The interface looks neat and clean. At the left side navigation, you can find all the settings you need to install, configure, and manage the software and server.
Go ahead and play around with the features to get familiarize.
CWP can be a good choice if you need to manage a few servers and prefer GUI. There are more control panel if you would like to explore.
Are you going to build a brand new cloud server?
Vultr offers a one-click solution to get VM with CentOS Web Panel. You have an option to provision VM in one of their low-latency 17 datacenter locations.
