This article will explain how to install a working single domain free install of the Plesk 9.0 control panel. Plesk is a control panel like HSphere or CPanel, that creates an environment for people who would like to have an out of the box fully functional shared hosting environment. This type of solution makes it easy to deploy LAMP stack for a customer or project.

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Prepare the Product

Plesk offers a free trial version of Plesk that will allow you to install and test their software, it will limit you to one usable domain. You will also need to sign up for an account at the following link:

http://www.parallels.com/products/plesk/

From here you will need to download the most relevant "autoinstaller" for your distrobution, in this instance we'll use the CentOS 5.x version.

Download Plesk 64bit

# mkdir plesk
# cd plesk
# wget http://download1.parallels.com/Plesk/PPP9/CentOS5/

Make the Installer Script Executable

By default the wget downloader will strip executable status from

# chmod +x plesk_installer

Install Dependencies

The 'autoinstaller' from plesk will require a couple of dependencies that aren't on our default kicks, but they are easy enough to install using the 'YUM' update manager.

Update your system

# yum update

Grab Dependencies

• RPM (RPM Package Manager) libraries

# yum install rpm-devel rpm-libs

• PAM

# yum install pam

• BIND

# rpm -e bind-libs bind-utils

Execute the Autoinstaller

This section of the install is done within an ncurses style interactive command line menu. Follow along with these screenshosts.

Welcome Screen

• It will default you to the next page, hit enter.

Select your Install Source

• The default is also good on this page, you will install from the plesk repositories via the net.

Proxy Settings

• By default Cloud Servers will not use a proxy, so you can go ahead and hit enter with the default 'no proxy'.

Select your Version

• Nothing is selected for you by default, in this instance we'll use the most current available release, version 9.0.1 at the time of this article.

Install Type

• For the intent of this article we will choose the Typical Installation, which will install necessary packages like Apache, PHP, MySQL, an MTA and other default packages that will generally come with Plesk.

Disk Space and Packages Needed

• The next two screens will let you know how much disk space and how many packages are going to be installed. You can just 'enter' through these as they don't give you any options to change.

• Prepare for a little wait, at this point the installer will take over and begin the install process.

Firewall

Now we just need to ensure that we can access Plesk's web interface by poking a hole in our firewall:

$ /sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 8443 -j ACCEPT
$ /sbin/service iptables save

Congratulations

Your installation is now complete.

Navigating to your CP

To log in to your Plesk control panel simply browse your server on port 8443 with https:

https://123.45.67.89:8443/

Logging in

Your plesk password will always be in the same spot on your server and it is easy to find incase you forget it:

from the command line:

# cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow

The line that it returns is the current admin password, and your admin user will always be admin. You always want to use the control panel when you make a password change, and it will automatically update this file.

Brandon Woodward, RHCE 13:16, 17 March 2009 (CDT)