RHEL

Environment used for this tutorial: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4/x86_64

Enable CRB, EPEL and Remi repository

subscription-manager repos --enable codeready-builder-for-rhel-9-$(arch)-rpms
dnf -y install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm
dnf install https://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-9.rpm

Disabling firewalld

First disable the firewalld

systemctl stop firewalld

Installing Nginx

For Nginx installation, we use the official Nginx YUM/DNF source.

1.Add the Nginx repository to your system’s repository list. You can do this by creating a new repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d/ named nginx.repo and adding the following configuration:

[nginx-stable]
name=nginx stable repo
baseurl=https://nginx.org/packages/rhel/9/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgkey=https://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key
module_hotfixes=true

Remember to replace $basearch with your specific cpu architecture(x86_64/aarch64/s390x), respectively1. This will set up Nginx from the official Nginx repository, which is recommended to get the latest stable version.

2.Update your local package index:

dnf check-update

3.Install Nginx

dnf install nginx

4.Verify the installation by checking the version of Nginx installed:

nginx -v

5.Finally, start the Nginx service and set it to boot up.

systemctl start nginx
systemctl enable nginx

Installing PHP

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 comes with PHP version of 8.0, now we change it to remi repo php-8.3

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.3

Similarly, update the DNF cache

dnf check-update

Then install the required PHP modules

dnf install php-{bcmath,bz2,cli,common,curl,fpm,gd,igbinary,mbstring,mysqlnd,opcache,readline,redis,xml,yaml,zip,posix,sodium}

Start the php-fpm service and set it to boot

systemctl start php-fpm
systemctl enable php-fpm

Now edit php-fpm user in file /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf

user = apache
group = apache

to

user = nginx
group = nginx

And modify the /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf, uncomment all permission lines, change user and group to nginx:

listen.owner = nginx
listen.group = nginx
listen.mode = 0660
listen.acl_users = nginx

• PS. You can change the nginx user to www-data by yourself, but make sure you set all the permissions correctly, we use nginx here because the nginx package already created the account for us.

Installing MariaDB

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 only comes with MariaDB 10 so we install MariaDB 11.4 from official DNF/YUM repository.

Here is a custom MariaDB DNF/YUM repository entry for RedHatEnterpriseLinux. Copy and paste it into a file under /etc/yum.repos.d (we suggest naming the file MariaDB.repo or something similar).

[mariadb]
name = MariaDB
baseurl = https://rpm.mariadb.org/11.4/rhel/$releasever/$basearch
gpgkey = https://rpm.mariadb.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-MariaDB
gpgcheck = 1

EPEL repository may be required to satisfy the pv dependency of galera.

After the file is in place, install and start MariaDB with:

dnf install MariaDB-server MariaDB-client

If you haven't already accepted the MariaDB GPG key, you will be prompted to do so during the install.

Start the MariaDB service and set it to boot

systemctl start mariadb
systemctl enable mariadb

Run the initial setup of MariaDB

mariadb-secure-installation

Installing Redis

NeXT-Panel relies on Redis for many of its functions, so you need to install redis-server.

change version from redis 6 to redis 7

dnf module enable redis:7

Install redis-server

dnf install redis

Start the redis-server service and set it to start at boot time

systemctl start redis
systemctl enable redis

Deploying the NeXT Panel

The first thing to do is to change the user that Nginx is running under, the default is nginx, and you need to change it to www-data.

make sure the user in the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf is nginx

user nginx;

Add the Nginx vhost file

nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/website-domain-you-set.conf

Then write the following configuration, taking care to change the path to the website files and the website domain name

server {  
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;

        root /path/to/your/site/public; # your site file path + /public
        index index.php;
        server_name example.com # The domain name of the site you're setting up.

        location / {
            try_files $uri /index.php$is_args$args;
        }

        location ~ \.php$ {
            try_files $fastcgi_script_name =404;
            include fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_index index.php;
            fastcgi_buffers 8 16k;
            fastcgi_buffer_size 32k;
            fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php-fpm/www.sock;
            fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $realpath_root;
            fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        }
}

Restart Nginx

systemctl restart nginx

Once the web hosting setup is complete, go to the root folder of the website you setup and execute the following command:

wget https://github.com/SSPanel-NeXT/NeXT-Panel/releases/download/24.5.1/NeXT-Panel-24.5.1.zip
unzip NeXT-Panel-24.5.1.zip .

The NeXT-Panel-24.5.1.zip in this case represents the latest released version of the NeXT-Panel, you should replace the version number with the latest one in the Release page.

Then set the overall permissions for your web directory

chmod -R 755 *
chown -R nginx:nginx *

• PS. change the user and group to www-data:www-data if you using www-data account

Then we start the database part of the creation operation by first logging into MariaDB Server

mariadb -u root -p

Enter the password you just set during installation and create a database with the encoding utf8mb4_unicode_ci and any name you want, using sspanel as an example.

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE sspanel CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Then create a local database user and restrict the user's privileges to the newly created database, using sspanel as the user name and sspanel-password as the user's password.

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE USER 'sspanel'@'localhost';
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON sspanel.* TO 'sspanel'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'sspanel-password';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Next, edit the site configuration file to include the database connection information you just set up, and then read the rest of the configuration instructions to customize the site.

cp config/.config.example.php config/.config.php
cp config/appprofile.example.php config/appprofile.php
nano config/.config.php

Next, perform the following site initialization setup

php xcat Migration new
php xcat Tool importSetting
php xcat Tool createAdmin
sudo -u nginx /usr/bin/php xcat ClientDownload

NeXT-Panel relies on the Maxmind GeoLite2 database to provide IP geolocation information, first you need to configure the maxmind_account_id and maxmind_license_key options in config/.config.php and then execute the following command:

php xcat Tool updateGeoIP2

Use crontab -e command to configure cron job for the panel：

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/php /path/to/your/site/xcat Cron

Improving System Security and Performance

Disable some dangerous PHP Functions

sed -i 's@^disable_functions.*@disable_functions = passthru,exec,system,chroot,chgrp,chown,shell_exec,proc_open,proc_get_status,ini_alter,ini_restore,dl,readlink,symlink,popepassthru,stream_socket_server,fsocket,popen@' /etc/php.ini

You need to restart the PHP-FPM service after modifying it.

systemctl restart php-fpm

Enable OPcache and JIT

In /etc/php.d/10-opcache.ini add the following configuration

zend_extension=opcache.so
opcache.file_cache=/tmp
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=64
opcache.jit=on
opcache.jit_buffer_size=256M
opcache.max_accelerated_files=65535
opcache.memory_consumption=512
opcache.revalidate_freq=60
opcache.validate_permission=on
opcache.validate_root=on

You also need to restart the PHP-FPM service after modifying it.

systemctl restart php-fpm