Plesk 12.5 Installation

Here I will show you how to install Plesk on CentOS 7 and perform a few basic setup tasks.

When installing Plesk you will need to make sure that your server meets the requirements and you have the correct partition layout you can read more on this from the Plesk site at https://kb.plesk.com/en/819

I have installed Plesk on multiple systems over the years and the main thing I have noted over the years is you can install Plesk on almost any system as long as you do the preparation work and make sure your system meets the minimum requirements 1GB ram (2GB for 10+ sites) and 10GB disk space, ideally you want 2GB+ ram, for windows systems you will want 2GB+ ram and 20GB+ disk space.

Preporation

I have already done a CentOS 7 install this was a minimal install mainly for speed of the install as I am doing a network install, once the install was complete I installed the base group

yum groupinstall base

Next we are ready to start the Plesk install I will be doing this from the command line as this is my preferred method, it also allows me to see any errors as they happen, when doing an install or an upgrade I like to use “screen” in case my session drops during the install process.

Getting the Plesk installer

You can get the installer from the main Plesk website or you can just download it in your terminal window, there are 2 ways to do this and 2 different installers, check the Plesk site for details, I am only going to show my way here.

wget http://autoinstall.plesk.com/plesk-installer
chmod +x plesk-installer

Run the Plesk Installer

./plesk-installer

Once the installer has started you will be presented with on screen instructions which you can follow to install the panel, I will be installing the panel with a custom configuration which I find has the best setup for most cases.

Promps
Welcome to Plesk installer:

• N

Select Product software source:

• N

HTTP Proxy Setup

• N

Select the products to install and their versions

• 1 (Plesk)
• 2 (Plesk 12.5)
• N

Select the installation type for Plesk

• 4 (Custom)
• N

Main components list for Plesk
The options that I have selected are my personal preference and I find it enables best performance, you may need to make changes to the selection depending on your licence and your preferences.

• 1 (Plesk)

• 2 (BIND DNS Server)

• 4 (Server Health Monitor)

• 5 (Fail2Ban)

• 6 (SELinux policy)

• 7 (All languages localization for Plesk)

• 9 (Plesk Migrator)

• 10 (MySQL server)

• 11 (Webmail services)

• 1 (disable Horde) I prefer Roundcube but the choice is yours you could have both installed

• 12 (Mail hosting)

• 2 (disable Odin Premium Antivirus) if you have a licence for this then leave this enabled

• 3 (SpamAssassin)

• 5 (Postfix)

• 8 (Dovecot)

• 13 (Web hosting)

• 1 (ProFTPD)

• 3 (disable Webalizer) I prefer AWstats and don’t see the point in having both installed but this is up to you

• 7 (Apache)

• 1 (mod_fcgid)

• 4 (Apache)

• 8 (PHP)

• 1 (PHP 7.0)

• 2 (PHP 5.6)

• 7 (PHP 5 from OS vendor)

• 8 (Nginx)

• 1 (Nginx web server)

• 14 (Plesk extensions)

• 1 (Plesk Web Srever Configuration Troubleshooter

• 2 (Plesk Firewall)

• 5 (Skins and Color Schemes)

Determining the amount of free disk space

• N

Preparing Your System for Product Installation

• N

The installer will now start to install all the required packages, this can take some time so you may want to go make a drink…
If you are watching the installer then you may see a on screen notice (Congratulations! All stages of the installation/upgrade have been finished) this has not fully installed Plesk it still needs to update with all the patches this will automatically install them so just wait a little bit longer untill you see the onscreen message that says “The changes were applied successfully” once you see this it should drop you back to your shell prompt and Plesk has been installed and updated.

You can now try accessing the hosting panel, if like me you have forgotten to sort out the firewall you will need add some rules, you can check this by navigating to the servers IP in a browser if you get a denied page then the firewall needs updating, you can turn this off (not advised) or you can add rules for websites and the panel.

First check the active zones for your network port mine is eth0

firewall-cmd --get-active-zones

public
interfaces:eth0

Add the rules to the public zone

firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-service=http
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-service=https
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=8443/tcp

Now that you have added the rules in you should be able to access the Default Plesk page on the servers IP and access the Plesk Panel (https://{server_ip}:8443) to complete the setup and add your licence key.