Add cPanel & WHM to CentOS VPS (Log Rotation, Configuring BIND nameserver & Backups...)

For this example I added cPanel & WHM to a CentOS VPS I created. Upon installation of cPanel I did a lot of configurations including setting up the log rotations, a BIND nameserver and backups.

The installation from the command line is simple. The syntax is just a little different than most of the other posts where I use Ubuntu because that's my favorite version of Linux. However, I like to use the most efficient tools when I can and in this case it's CentOS. I have done a fair amount of scripting and automation using CentOS and Vagrant boxes so this was a cinch.  

To install the latest version of cPanel from the command line the commands are as follows:

cd /home

wget -N http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/latest

sh latest

/usr/local/cpanel/cpkeyclt 

From here the most difficult parts are done and the rest is quite intuitive if you've worked with servers and monitoring systems. I added my email and the nameservers to begin with. As you can see below with cPanel it is more about just knowing how to configure the system and you just select your parameters. For example at the bottom of this screen shot you can even select how you want to receive Apache logs. 

Next I was able to configure the Log Rotation. Log rotation is important to not use up all of a system's resources. In this automated process log files are compressed and stored within an archive folder for cPanel.

The cPanel allows for a lot of customization. In a previous blog post I went over how to manually create Cron Jobs: https://jgardnerla.blogspot.com/2020/04/cron-job-daemon-shell-script-to-send.html. However, with cPanel it's very simple to just plug in the days and times you want updates and backups to run. The manual process is good because it allows you to do more customization but this is a good solution if you want simple administration from a GUI.

As simple as cPanel is to use there is a lot it can do. Here I synchronized the server time which is important when serving requests and handling HSTS.

The server is just getting setup but here are the initial server logs. The system is starting up and the daemon's are beginning to listen on their appropriate ports so that they can spring into action when they are needed.

And here is the BIND nameserver starting up successfully.

Now to administer the cPanel I can just return to the secure portal and begin with any customizations or configurations that are required.