How to Install Xibo CMS on Ubuntu 20.04

Xibo is open-source digital signage (public display signs) solution that is comprised of a web-based content management system (CMS). The best way to capture the attention of people for your very important announcements can be done with digital signs using Xibo. It lets us turn PCs and TVs into a distinctive way of getting the word out, transforming them into information desks that you can place in strategic locations to draw people's attention.

Using Xibo, you can set up your own digital signage server that can push out images, video, and even PowerPoint presentations to kiosks automatically, allowing you to keep your entire organization up to date on your latest news without resorting to mass e-mailings or having to hand-edit files or slideshows on multiple machines.

Xibo can be run through Docker or on a web server with MySQL/PHP installed. In this tutorial, we learn how to install Xibo CMS with Docker on Ubuntu 20.04.

Prerequisites

A Ubuntu 20.04 instance
A user with sudo priviledge

Step 1: Install Docker

First, we will install docker-engine and docker-compose.

Install pre-requisites packages:

sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common

Now we should add the GP key of the docker repository:

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

Let's now add Docker to the APT sources

sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu focal stable"

We can install docker-engine now:

sudo apt install docker-ce

To make sure we obtain the most updated stable version of Docker Compose, we’ll download this software from its official Github repository.

First, confirm the latest version available on their releases page. At the time of this writing, the most current stable version is 2.0.1.

The following command will download the 2.0.1 release and save the executable file at /usr/local/bin/docker-compose, which will make this software globally accessible as docker-compose:

sudo curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/v2.0.1/docker-compose-linux-x86_64 -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Next, set the correct permissions so that the docker-compose command is executable:

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

To verify that the installation was successful, you can run:

docker-compose --version

Docker Compose version v2.0.1

Now we need to add the non-root user to the docker group so the user can use the docker command without the sudo privileges:

sudo usermod -aG docker username

Step 2: Download and Extract Xibo Docker File

Let first create the folder of our Xibo CMS

sudo mkdir /opt/xibo

Give the permissions to the user

sudo chown -R username:username /opt/xibo

cd /opt/xibo

You can download the latest Download Xibo CMS:

wget -O xibo-docker.tar.gz https://xibo.org.uk/api/downloads/cms

As of writing this article I am using Xibo 3.0.3 version.

tar --strip-components=1 -zxvf xibo-docker.tar.gz

We now have everything to install our Xibo

Step 3: Configure Xibo Docker-compose

Our Xibo container will run through docker-compose. So the files are extracted into /opt/xibo

ls -l /opt/xibo

total 84
-rw-rw-r-- 1 franck franck  1491 Sep  8 08:01 cms_custom-ports.yml.template
-rw-rw-r-- 1 franck franck  1159 Sep  8 08:01 cms_remote-mysql.yml
-rw-rw-r-- 1 franck franck  4024 Sep  8 08:01 config.env.template
-rw-rw-r-- 1 franck franck  2231 Sep  8 08:01 config.env.template-remote-mysql
-rw-rw-r-- 1 franck franck  1511 Nov  2 23:18 docker-compose.yml
-rw-rw-r-- 1 franck franck 34520 Sep  8 08:01 LICENSE
-rw-rw-r-- 1 franck franck  2088 Sep  8 08:01 README.md
drwxr-xr-x 5 root   root    4096 Nov  2 17:25 shared
-rw-r--r-- 1 franck franck 15570 Sep  8 08:54 xibo-docker.tar.gz

Xibo uses a configuration file to tell docker how the environment is configured such as the email config, mysql password, etc. A template file with the information needed is present and is called config.env.template; we will make a copy of this file, renaming it to config.env

cp config.env.template config.env

Now we will edit some information as below

vim config.env

MYSQL_PASSWORD=YOUR_DB_PASSWORD
CMS_SERVER_NAME=YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME

Normally Xibo possesses a default web interface running on port 80 but we will only change this information to port 8080 as we will be using Nginx to proxy the communication on ports 80 and 443. To do so, we need to edit the docker-compose file to edit only the port of the cms-web service

vim docker-compose.yml

cms-web:
        image: xibosignage/xibo-cms:release-3.0.3
        volumes:
            - "./shared/cms/custom:/var/www/cms/custom:Z"
            - "./shared/backup:/var/www/backup:Z"
            - "./shared/cms/web/theme/custom:/var/www/cms/web/theme/custom:Z"
            - "./shared/cms/library:/var/www/cms/library:Z"
            - "./shared/cms/web/userscripts:/var/www/cms/web/userscripts:Z"
            - "./shared/cms/ca-certs:/var/www/cms/ca-certs:Z"
        restart: always
        links:
            - cms-db:mysql
            - cms-xmr:50001
        environment:
            - XMR_HOST=cms-xmr
            - CMS_USE_MEMCACHED=true
            - MEMCACHED_HOST=cms-memcached
        env_file: config.env
        ports:
            - "8080:80"

Step 4: Configure Xibo with SSL Behind Nginx

Now as we will use nginx to proxy the communication, we will first need to install it

sudo apt install nginx

In this article, we suppose that you already have your SSL certificate. In our case, we will copy the certificate and the key for the domain name

sudo cp xibo.domain.crt /etc/nginx/certs/xibo.domain.crt

sudo cp xibo.domain.key /etc/nginx/certs/xibo.domain.key

Now create the configuration file of Xibo. Make sure to replace the value of the server IP, the Xibo domain name, the Xibo certificates, and keys with the good ones related to your configurations.

sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/xibo_cms.conf

upstream xibo.domain.com {
       server SERVER_IP:8080;
}
server {
        server_name xibo.domain.com;
        listen 80 ;
        access_log /var/log/nginx/xibo.log;
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}
server {
        server_name xibo.domain.com;
        listen 443 ssl http2 ;
        access_log /var/log/nginx/xibo.log;
        ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
        ssl_ciphers 'ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA:!DSS';
        ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
        ssl_session_timeout 5m;
        ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:50m;
        ssl_session_tickets off;
        ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/certs/xibo.domain.crt;
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/certs/xibo.domain.key;
        add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000";
        location / {
                proxy_pass http://xibo.domain.com;
        }
}

Now created a symbolic of the configuration file

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/xibo_cms.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/xibo_cms.conf

As it's our first configuration, remove the default configuration on the enabled sites not to have some conflicts

sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Now start the nginx service

sudo systemctl start nginx

Now enable on startup

sudo systemctl enable nginx

Check your configuration

sudo nginx -t

nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

Now restart the service to take the configuration into consideration

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Now open the ports 80 and 443 on the firewall:

sudo ufw allow 80,443/tcp

Also, make sure to open ssh before enabling UFW if not yet

sudo ufw allow 'OpenSSH'

Now enable UFW if not yet

sudo ufw enable

Step 5: Install Xibo container

Now that our Nginx is configured, we can run our docker-compose file

cd /opt/xibo

We will run the docker-compose file in the background. It can take some time the first time

docker-compose up -d

Now can have a look at the containers running

docker container ps

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                                COMMAND                  CREATED              STATUS              PORTS                                                  NAMES
b5e8dda81529   xibosignage/xibo-cms:release-3.0.3   "/entrypoint.sh"         About a minute ago   Up About a minute   0.0.0.0:8080->80/tcp, :::8080->80/tcp                  xibo-cms-web-1
9f4591f0f91a   mysql:5.7                            "docker-entrypoint.s…"   About a minute ago   Up About a minute   3306/tcp, 33060/tcp                                    xibo-cms-db-1
b706402036a0   xibosignage/xibo-xmr:release-0.8     "/entrypoint.sh"         2 minutes ago        Up 2 minutes        0.0.0.0:9505->9505/tcp, :::9505->9505/tcp, 50001/tcp   xibo-cms-xmr-1
75a971ab7435   memcached:alpine                     "docker-entrypoint.s…"   2 minutes ago        Up 2 minutes        11211/tcp                                              xibo-cms-memcached-1
3d2e30e8f9cb   ianw/quickchart                      "node --max-http-hea…"   2 minutes ago        Up 2 minutes        3400/tcp                                               xibo-cms-quickchart-1

Now you can try to access the Xibo page by your domain name http://xibo.domain.com

The default Xibo login credentials are:

username: xibo_admin
password: password

You can change the password by going to the profile settings.

If you want to stop Xibo, just move to the folder and run the command

docker-compose down

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned how to install Xibo CMS with Docker on Ubuntu 20.04. If you wish to upload large size of images, you can do so by the configuration of 'Php.ini' fil. For further settings and customization of Xibo CMS you can consider reading its official documentation for more details. Thank you for reading, and get back to us if you face any issues and leave your valuable comments.