How to Install OSSN on POP! OS

OSSN (Open Source Social Network) is a free and open-source social networking software written in PHP. In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install OSSN on POP! OS, one of the popular Linux distributions.

Prerequisites

Before installing OSSN on POP! OS, make sure you have the following prerequisites:

A non-root user with sudo privileges
LAMP stack installed on your server.

Step 1: Download OSSN

First, visit the official website https://www.opensource-socialnetwork.org/ and download the latest version of OSSN:

wget https://github.com/opensource-socialnetwork/opensource-socialnetwork/archive/v7.3.zip -O ossn.zip

The above command will download the latest version of OSSN and save it to the ossn.zip file.

Step 2: Install Unzip

Next, extract the downloaded file using the unzip utility. If it is not already installed on your POP! OS system, then install it using the following command:

sudo apt install unzip

Step 3: Extract the OSSN

After installing the unzip utility, extract the ossn.zip file using the below command:

sudo unzip ossn.zip -d /var/www/html/

The above command will extract the OSSN files to the /var/www/html/opensource-socialnetwork-7.3 directory.

Step 4: Configure the OSSN

Once the extraction is completed, navigate to the extracted directory using the below command:

cd /var/www/html/opensource-socialnetwork-7.3

Then copy the sample configuration file to ossn.config.php using the following command:

cp ./framework/ossn.config.example.php ./framework/ossn.config.php

Edit the ossn.config.php file and configure the database connection details like below:

$config = array(
'dbuser' => '<database_user>',
'dbpwd' => '<database_password>',
'dbhost' => '<database_host>',
'dbname' => '<database_name>',
);

Save and close the file.

Step 5: Change the File Permissions

Next, you need to give the web server (Apache) write permissions on the ./ossn_data and ./cache directories using the below command:

sudo chown www-data:www-data ./ossn_data ./cache

Step 6: Restart the Apache Service

Once all the configurations have been set up, restart the Apache service using the following command:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Step 7: Open Server Name

Finally, open your favorite web browser and browse to the following URL:

http://<your-ip-address>/opensource-socialnetwork-7.3

You will see the OSSN Install Page as shown below:

Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the OSSN installation process.

Conclusion

That's it! You have successfully installed OSSN on your POP! OS system. You can now start building your own social network website.