Server support blog

“Extremely friendly…widely used …de-facto industry standard” cPanel all this and more. And I dislike it as much as it popular (I’ll talk about it later).
What surprised me that cpanel.net web site does not contain the link to the installation instruction on it’s front page which should be only logical.

However it’s relatively easy to find all kinds of information related to cPanel elsewhere. Here is how to install cPanel from command line in 4 easy steps.
For the prerequisites you will have to have freshly installed Centos server – minimal installation will do, connected to the Internet (which is kind of obvious) with functional yum package manager.

1. Shell

   cd /usr/local/src

   1	cd /usr/local/src

   This is my personal preference of where to put all 3rd party software but you need to be careful cPanel has some very personal relationship with /usr filesystem (if you have it on separate filesystem) – you need to maintain at least 2gb of free space on /usr to allow cPanel upgrades to go through

2. Shell

   wget -N http://layer1.cpanel.net/latest

   1	wget -N http://layer1.cpanel.net/latest

   This will download cPanel installation script that will do most of the work.

   Shell

   sh ./latest

   1	sh ./latest

   You will see installation progress on your console screen – this is fairly lengthy procedure – on average modern server (I am talking about dual Xeon with 16Gb RAM here) sitting on average modern Internet connection (2-4Gb fiber) this will take approximately 30-60 minutes so you will have some time to spare.
   When finished you will see something like this on the screen

   Shell

   2013-11-07 12:20:30 507 ( INFO): Done 2013-11-07 12:20:30 173 ( INFO): cPanel install finished in 65 minutes and 35 seconds!

   1 2	2013-11-07 12:20:30  507 ( INFO): Done 2013-11-07 12:20:30  173 ( INFO): cPanel install finished in 65 minutes and 35 seconds!

3. Next step would be to open in your browser https://your-server-IP:2087 and login with root and root password correspondingly – you will go through 6 post installation steps and end up on WHM front page with trial license warning right in the middle
4. Now you can go and purchase your license/register your server. After that you will need to go back to your ssh session and run license update.
   Shell

   # /usr/local/cpanel/cpkeyclt Updating cPanel license...Done. Update succeeded. Building global cache for cpanel...Done

   1 2 3

   # /usr/local/cpanel/cpkeyclt Updating cPanel license...Done. Update succeeded. Building global cache for cpanel...Done

5. Refresh WHM front page and trial license warning will disappear. Your new cPanel server is ready.Happy hosting.