Install sabre/katana on a CentOS 7 VPS

logo-katana-heroIn this article we will install sabre/katana on a CentOS 7 VPS with Apache, MariaDB and PHP. Sabre/katana is free and open source contact, calendar, task-list and file server. Based on world-widely used standards (respectively CardDAV, CalDAV and WebDAV), sabre/katana will help you to sync your important data between any device, from any location, at anytime. sabre/katana is powered by sabre/dav. It is an open source technology trusted by many leading companies such as ownCloud, Atmail, Box and fruux. sabre/katana is still under development, and many changes are still applying to the product.

In order to run sabre/katana on your CentOS 7 server, you need to have the following requirements installed:

  • PHP version 5.5 or newer
  • MySQL/MariaDB or SQLite database.
  • Web server, Apache or nginx

Log in to your server via SSH as user root

ssh root@IP

and make sure that all packages are fully up to date by executing the following command

yum -y update

Run the following command to install MariaDB database server

yum install mariadb mariadb-server

Start the MariaDB database server and enable it to start at the boot time

systemctl start mariadb
systemctl enable mariadb

Run the ‘mysql_secure_installation’ script to secure the database server and set your MariaDB root password

Log in to the MariaDB server using the ‘root’ user and create new database end user.

mysql -u root -p

CREATE DATABASE katana;
CREATE USER 'katanauser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `katana`.* TO 'katanauser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Replace ‘PASSWORD’ with an actual strong password.

Now, we will install Apache web server

yum install httpd

Same as we did with MariaDB, start the Apache web server and add it to automatically start on the system start-up

systemctl start httpd
systemctl enable httpd

Now we need to install PHP among with few PHP modules

yum install php php-gd php-common

Download the latest ZIP archive of sabre/katana from GitHub to your server. At the moment of writing this article it is version 0.3.2

wget https://github.com/fruux/sabre-katana/releases/download/0.3.2/katana_v0.3.2.zip

Create a directory for sabre/katana’s files inside the document root directory on your server. Usually it is the ‘/var/www/html/’ directory.

mkdir /var/www/html/katana

Unpack the downloaded archive to the created directory

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unzip katana_v0.3.2.zip -d /var/www/html/katana/

Change the ownership of the ‘katana’ directory

chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/katana

Next, create Apache virtual host for your domain. Create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ directory with the following content

vim /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf

IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf

and create the virtual host

vim /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/yourdomain.com.conf

<VirtualHost YOUR_SERVER_IP:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/katana/"
ServerName yourdomain.com
ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com
ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log"
CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined

<Directory "/var/www/html/katana/">
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Restart the web server for the changes to take effect.

systemctl restart httpd

Finally, open a web browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/public/install.php to run the installer and follow the instructions in the browser to finish the installation.

Of course you don’t have to do any of this if you use one of our Linux VPS Hosting services, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to install sabre/katana for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.

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