Just for fun: Installing 2019 Vanilla Forums software on LTS Debian 11 Bullseye in 2025!
Thanks to and following the kind suggestions from @nwnuyhs here at LES, I decided to try installing the 2019 Version 3.3 of Vanilla Forums on Debian 11 LTS Bullseye.
I am posting here as I go along, just for fun. Besides a few laughs, I also will appreciate friendly suggestions and corrections.
The steps should be, approximately, the same as recommended by @nwnuyhs:
- Get a VPS
- Install aapanel
- Use aapanel to install nginx, PHP 7.4, and mysql 5.7 database
- Download the Vanilla zip
- Extract the Vanilla zip in the website root
- Visit website URL to install
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Thanked by (1)nwnuyhs
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Step 1: Get a VPS
I provisioned a small VPS at Upcloud. The reason I selected Upcloud was that they still offer one click installation of Debian 11. Plus I had some unused account credits.
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Step 2: Install aapanel
With one click I can copy the aapanel install command! Then I can paste the command into root's terminal on the VPS.
Here is a paste of the aapanel install command as I copied it:
I was surprised to be asked for my email at the critical moment when I was wondering whether the one click copy had succeeded:
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Running the pasted command as root seems to have succeeded.
I saved 2,024 lines of terminal output. Hundreds of packages were installed.
At the end of the terminal output, I saw login credentials:
Let's go see if we can access the panel. . . .
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Yes.
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Mostly in accordance with @nwnuyhs' instructions I changed some of the default aapanel software install versions to older versions:
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
I clicked the One-click button. A pop-up appeared with lots of installs listed. I watched for a while as the installs rushed by, then ate some dinner. When I returned, I saw that there were no remaining tasks and no messages, so maybe that means success. Clicking Execution log shows what seemed like an okay result.
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Should an nginx default page be showing on WAN port 80 at this point in the process? I don't see anything on port 80 from outside. Is that a problem? Ah! Lynx does seem to find something at http://127.0.0.1:
Yes, looks like nginx is running:
The next step is to download and extract the Vanilla zip. There doesn't seem to be a /var/www or a /var/www/html directory, so I decided to try to wget the zip to the root directory and extract it later. But where to extract? I never used aapanel or nginx before. . . . Maybe aapanel has a special location for the root directory. Maybe I should look at the aapanel some more. @nwnuyhs
Here below is the interesting download transcript for the Vanilla zip. Can anyone give me a hint about what's going on with those long strings? Also, is there a checksum for the download? Thanks!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
I am guessing that I have to add a website in aapanel before I get a webroot directory into which to extract the Vanilla zip.
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
aapanel best panel
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
Okay, added a site with aapanel. Webroot found at /www/wwwroot/$site_name.xxx. Seems to render from WAN. No security certificate yet. Here's from my Chromebook in Mexico:
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Headed over to /www/wwwroot/$site_name.xxx and unzipped the vanilla-3.3.zip.
Unzipping made a new subdirectory called package. Here's what's inside the package subdirectory:
The README.md file doesn't seem to offer install instructions. If I go in my browser to http://$site_name.xxx/ the default web page shows the same as in the above screenshot. If I point the browser at http://$site_name.xxx/package, I get
The package subdirectory and all the many, many files and directories inside it are owned by root:root, not www:www. That doesn't seem right.
Did I unzip incorrectly? Should the contents of the package subdirectory be one level higher, inside /www/wwwroot/$site_name.xxx? If I had unzipped one level higher in /www/wwwroot and then changed the directory name "package" to $site_name.xxx plus chown everything to www:www, maybe that would have worked? Thanks!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
look at who owns "$site_name.xxx" or "wwwroot" and chown all directories and files to that user:group
Never make the same mistake twice. There are so many new ones to make.
It’s OK if you disagree with me. I can’t force you to be right.
sorry too late to reply @Not_Oles
I find from this step you maybe face some problem, I will record a video for you
Headed over to /www/wwwroot/$site_name.xxx and unzipped the vanilla-3.3.zip.
Just wait for me
This is the video:
sorry, the video has a mistake,the aapanel recommend to use free version , rather than the pro version
aaPanel Free edition install script
URL=https://www.aapanel.com/script/install_7.0_en.sh && if [ -f /usr/bin/curl ];then curl -ksSO "$URL" ;else wget --no-check-certificate -O install_7.0_en.sh "$URL";fi;bash install_7.0_en.sh aapanel
So good, the professional version gives you the Task Manager twice: https://www.aapanel.com/new/pricing.html
And had their reddit thread banned... but it's still listed in their website
https://www.reddit.com/r/aaPanel_Offical/
Never make the same mistake twice. There are so many new ones to make.
It’s OK if you disagree with me. I can’t force you to be right.
You can use free version
You can use free version
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
State owned control panel?
Than=compare;then=sequence:brought=bring;bought=buy:staffs=pile of sticks:informations/infos=no plural.
It wisnae me! A big boy done it and ran away. || NVMe2G for life! until death (the end is nigh).
Yeap and as far as I can tell no official release to patch the vulnerabilities they had a few years ago
Free Hosting at YetiNode | MicroNode| Cryptid Security | URL Shortener | LaunchVPS | ExtraVM | Host-C | In the Node, or Out of the Loop?
Just curious: why not use the latest OSS version, which is OSS Release 2025.010 (LTS 2)? See https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/releases
"A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)
As far as I can tell, the OSS version is no longer supported or encouraged by Higher Logic, which is the company that now owns Vanilla (now called "Higher Logic Vanilla"). The web site makes no mention of the OSS version (unless I've missed it): https://www.higherlogic.com/vanilla/
"A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)
Thanks to everyone who has read this thread an also to those who have posted helpful comments!
Thanks especially to @nwnuyhs for his helpful video! I am at 4:09 of the 8:59 minutes. Of course I will watch the remainder of the video.
As shown in @nwnuyhs' video I successfully used aapanel to issue the SSL certificate. Chrome now shows a secure connection.
Here is a screenshot of the beginning of the SSL certificate issuance inside aapanel:
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
I saw that @nwnuyhs' video showed using aapanel to unzip the vanilla-3.3.zip. I am guessing that aapanel probably extracts the files with ownership different than root:root, probably www:www. But I am not sure.
As root, I unzipped vanilla-3.3.zip into /www/wwwroot. This gave me /www/wwwroot/project, which I changed to /www/wwwroot/$site_name.xxx. Loading the site again gave the fatal Twig error mentioned above:
So I changed ownership of /www/wwwroot/$site_name.xxx to www:www.
Reloading https://site_name.xxx in Chrome gave me progress--an error message from the Vanilla Version 3.3 installer telling me:
Rather than changing ownership of all the files, which might be the correct fix, let's just fix these two errors and see which errors are next. /s
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
So now I see the Vanilla 3.1 installer.
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Congratulation to you
.
you are nearly successful to install Vanilla