How to Install Statamic on Ubuntu

Prerequisites

To install Statamic on an Ubuntu instance you will need the following:

• An Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 VPS with root access enabled or a user with Sudo privileges (you can follow our Digital Ocean or Linode guides to get yours set up)
• A server with at least 1GB memory
• A valid domain name pointed to your server and SSL certificate in place
• PHP 8.1+

Update Packages

If this is the first time using apt in this session, you should sure package lists and installed packages are up to date.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Install PHP & Required Modules

sudo apt install php-common php-fpm php-json php-mbstring zip unzip php-zip php-cli php-xml php-tokenizer php-curl -y

Install Composer

Install Composer with the following command:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

Next, you need to move the composer.phar file to a globally accessible directory and update its permissions.

sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/composer

Now you can check to make sure Composer is installed and configured correctly by running this command:

composer

Install Statamic CLI

Next up, let's install the Statamic CLI. To do this, run the following command in your terminal:

composer global require statamic/cli

Upon installation, you can now use the statamic new command to spin up fresh Statamic sites with a CLI setup wizard 🧙‍♂️ to guide you through a variety of settings and options.

Our CLI is essentially a super fancy wrapper around the composer create-project command. You can choose to not install it, but only at your own annoyance.

Create a new Statamic Application

Now we'll create a new Statamic application using the statamic new command.

First, navigate to the /var/www directory:

cd /var/www

Next, run the following install command:

statamic new example.com

script -q -c "statamic new --no-interaction example.com"

Set Permissions

Once Statamic is installed, you'll need to grant appropriate permissions to the non-root user so Statamic and Laravel can write to the necessary system directories.

sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/example.com
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com/storage
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com/content
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com/bootstrap/cache

Install & Configure Nginx

Next, install Nginx with the following command:

sudo apt install nginx -y

After the install completes, Nginx will start automatically. You can verify the service by running the following the command:

sudo systemctl status nginx

Next, let's set up the minimum recommended config file to serve your site. Create a new file with vim (or your command line editor of choice) at /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com, making sure to replace example.com everywhere with your desired domain.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com; 
    root /var/www/example.com/public;
 
    add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
    add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff";
 
    index index.html index.htm index.php;
 
    charset utf-8;
 
    set $try_location @static;
 
    if ($request_method != GET) {
        set $try_location @not_static;
    }
 
    if ($args ~* "live-preview=(.*)") {
        set $try_location @not_static;
    }
 
    location / {
        try_files $uri $try_location;
    }
 
    location @static {
        try_files /static${uri}_$args.html $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
    }
 
    location @not_static {
        try_files $uri /index.php?$args;
    }
 
    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
 
    error_page 404 /index.php;
 
    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
 
    location ~ /\.(?!well-known).* {
        deny all;
    }
}

You can confirm that the configuration doesn’t contain any syntax errors with the following command:

sudo nginx -t

You should see output similar to this:

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

Time to reload Nginx and apply these changes:

sudo systemctl reload nginx

Now visit your IP Address or https://example.com (but like the actual domain) if you've pointed your domain's A Record and you should see the Statamic landing page.

Conclusion

That's pretty much it. Time for you to take it from here.

If this is your production server, you'll probably want to add cache expiry headers and so on, but those rules and what you cache to the browser are all up to you.

There are many other variables at play when building your own server. It's unrealistic to think we've covered them all here, or that this article won't get out of date at times as things change.

If you run into issues not covered here, you may want to read through this discussion where several folks work through many edge cases happening all at once.