How to Install Joomla on Ubuntu 24.04

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP. It is used for hosting and managing websites and online applications. Due to its flexibility, extensibility, and ease of use, it has become a popular choice for individuals, businesses, and organizations to build and maintain websites. Joomla provides an intuitive and user-friendly administrative interface that makes it relatively easy for non-technical users to create and manage website content.

Step 1 – Install LAMP Server

First, you must install Apache, MySQL, PHP, and other packages on your server. You can install all of them using the following command.

apt install apache2 mysql-server php libapache2-mod-php php-dev php-bcmath php-intl php-soap php-zip php-curl php-mbstring php-mysql php-gd php-xml unzip -y

After the successful installation, start and enable Apache service with the following command.

systemctl start apache2
systemctl enable apache2

Step 2 – Create a Database

Joomla uses MySQL as a database backend, so you will need to create a database and user for Joomla.

First, connect to the MySQL shell.

mysql

Next, create a database and user for Joomla.

mysql> CREATE DATABASE joomla;
mysql> CREATE USER 'joomla'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'securepassword';

Then, grant all the privileges on the Joomla database.

mysql> GRANT ALL ON joomla.* TO 'joomla'@'localhost';

Next, flush the privileges and exit from the MySQL shell.

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> EXIT;

Step 3 – Install Joomla CMS

First, visit the Joomla official website and download the latest version of Joomla using the wget command.

wget https://downloads.joomla.org/cms/joomla5/5-3-0/Joomla_5-3-0-Stable-Full_Package.zip

Once the download is finished, unzip the downloaded file to the Apache web root directory.

unzip Joomla_5-3-0-Stable-Full_Package.zip -d /var/www/html/joomla

Next, change the ownership and permissions of the Joomla directory.

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/joomla/
chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/joomla/

Step 4 – Configure Apache for Joomla

Next, create an Apache virtual host configuration file for Joomla.

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/joomla.conf

Add the following configurations.

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerAdmin [email protected]

ServerName joomla.example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/joomla

<Directory /var/www/html/joomla/>
        Options FollowSymlinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
</Directory>

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com_error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com_access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

Save and close the file, then activate the Joomla virtual host with the following command.

a2ensite joomla.conf

Finally, restart the Apache service to apply the changes.

systemctl restart apache2

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to install Joomla with Apache on the Ubuntu 24.04 server.