This article was written for a legacy version of Directus. Only reference this information if you are using Directus 6 and can not upgrade to version 7.

Installing Directus 6 on LAMP

Before you can experience all of the awesome features within Directus, you first need to install it. In this article, I’ll show you how to get started with Directus.

Note: this tutorial is specific to Directus v6.

This tutorial assumes you have a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack pre-installed. If you don’t have a server yet, I highly recommend getting a DigitalOcean droplet with a LAMP one-click install.

If you already have a VPS with a clean Ubuntu installation, I recommend you follow this tutorial on installing the LAMP stack.

The following steps should work for other versions of Ubuntu, and even other operating systems, but bear in mind that not all of these combinations have been tested.

Installing Directus using SSH & Git (recommended)

PHP, Apache & MySQL setup

Directus requires PHP’s cUrl extension to be installed, so let's start by installing that:
sudo apt-get install php-curl

Enable Apache mod_rewrite extension by running sudo a2enmod rewrite and adding:

<Directory /var/www/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
 </Directory>

to your Apache config file which is located at /etc/apache2/sites-available/default.

Make sure to restart the apache2 service afterwards by running:
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Directus does not fully support Strict Mode due to limitations with the PDO and MySQL Drivers. Disable MySQL Strict Mode by creating a new file /etc/mysql/conf.d/disable_strict_mode.cnf which contains the following two lines:

[mysqld]
sql_mode=IGNORE_SPACE,NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,NO_ZERO_DATE,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION

Restart the MySQL service afterwards by running sudo systemctl restart mysql.

Cloning Directus from GitHub

Next up, navigate to /var/www/html by running cd /var/www/html. This is Apache’s default public folder in which we’ll install Directus.

Next up, clone Directus from GitHub as follows:
git clone https://github.com/directus/directus.git

This clones the master branch of Directus to a folder called directus which means your Directus instance will be available at http://{{your_ip_address}}/directus.

Note: the owner of the directus folder may be set to root if you clone Directus directly. Make sure to change the owner back to www-data otherwise Directus won’t have write-access to important locations like /uploads. You can reset the permissions by running sudo chown www-data -R /var/www/html/directus

Installing Composer dependencies

Directus is built using a number of external packages and dependencies. To install these, we use a utility named Composer — a package manager for PHP. If you don’t already have composer, you can install it by running apt install composer. Composer uses the zip and unzip Ubuntu packages for some operations, so it’s also recommended to install those by running apt install zip unzip php7.0-zip (replace the 7.0 bit with your current version of PHP. Run php -v to find out which version you’re running).

Once you have Composer, it’s time to install Directus’ dependencies by navigating to the directus directory and running composer install.

My particular setup gave an error about a missing PHP-extension called ext-dom. I fixed this by installing php-xml with sudo apt-get install php-xml.

Installing Directus via FTP

If you don’t have access to your server’s command line, Directus provides a pre-built version with the Composer dependencies already installed.

For Directus to function properly you still need to make sure your hosting provider supports all of the required extensions — listed here on the Directus readme).

To install Directus using this pre-built version, download the latest version from the releases page and upload it to your server with (S)FTP.

With Directus now installed, you’re ready to start creating something amazing!

Your friends at Directus

🐰