CloudLinux + cPanel Installation
This is a brief guide on setting up CloudLinux (6.4), cPanel, and softaculous.
CloudLinux
Install CloudLinux using PXE or DVD.
For my particular server, I have set my partition scheme up like so:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 20G 1.3G 18G 7% /
tmpfs 32G 0 32G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb2 500G 198M 475G 1% /home
/dev/sda3 9.9G 151M 9.2G 2% /tmp
/dev/sda5 214G 188M 203G 1% /usr/local
/dev/sdb1 50G 425M 47G 1% /var
Since cPanel runs out of /usr/local/cpanel, and because logs are placed in /usr/local/apache/logs, it's a good idea to give /usr/local as much room as possible. The databases and configuration files for cPanel will be placed in /var. Your user's contents will be placed in their home directories in /home. For performance considerations, try putting /var and /home on a fast storage device.
Once the install is done, you will need to activate the license with CloudLinux's CLN. To do so, run:
/usr/sbin/rhnreg_ks --activationkey=xxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The activation key is found on your CLN account at https://cln.cloudlinux.com/rhn/activationkeys/List.do
Once activated, you will be able to update the system.
yum -y update
Installing cPanel
As per the instructions on cPanel's website, to start the cPanel installation process, run:
cd /home wget -N http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/latest sh latest
Depending on your system, the install process will take about an hour. Once completed, you should reboot the system.
Login to WHM by going to https://serverip:2087/ to finish the install process. You may need to set up your license if cPanel was unable to activate itself. If the license doesn't work, you may want to doublecheck your license's IP address on your account at http://store.cpanel.net/
Installing Softaculous
In order for softaculous to work on cPanel, you must activate Ioncube for cPanel's PHP engine through WHM (Server Configuration -> Tweak Settings -> PHP -> check ioncube next to 'cPanel PHP Loader').
Start the install process by running:
wget -N http://files.softaculous.com/install.sh chmod 755 install.sh ./install.sh
Troubleshooting
One instance of Softaculous stopped working and kept returning a 500 Server Error after a timeout (around 30 seconds to 1 minute). This could be related to the server's upgrade from EasyApache 3 to EasyApache 4 which caused PHP to change.
The IonCube loader was definitely installed and loaded, but running /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/php/56/bin/php-cgi /usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi/softaculous/index.php even in the terminal doesn't work since it returns
Status: 500 Internal Server Error
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.6.30
Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
with exit code 255.
After stracing the PHP execution of the script, it looks like these two files was the cause:
/usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi/softaculous/enduser/iscripts.php/usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi/softaculous/enduser/scripts.ser
The files appear to be incomplete (the PHP file contains an incomplete array, and the .ser file looks to be truncated).
Removing the two files fixed Softaculous.