How To Install CentOS Web Panel on CentOS 8 in LightSail

Noor Qureshi March 12, 2022

In this tutorial, we’re going to install CentOS Web Panel on CentOS 8 in AWS Lightsail instance. For those who are unfamiliar, Centos Web Panel is a free alternative to cPanel that provides a lot of features to manage servers and manage services via GUI rather than a command-line interface.

CentOS Web Panel comes with pre-installed Apache, Varnish, suPHP & suExec, Mod Security, PHP version switcher, Postfix and Dovecot, MySQL Database Management, PhpMyAdmin, CSF Firewall, CageFS, SSL Certificates, and FreeDNS (DNS server).

This article assumes you have a basic understanding of Linux, know how to use the shell, and, most importantly, host your site on your own VPS. The installation is straightforward and assumes you are running in the root account; if you are not, you may need to add 'sudo' to the commands to gain root access. I’ll walk you through the installation of the CentOS Web Panel on a CentOS 8 server step by step.

1. Create Instance on Lightsail

The first thing you need to do is install CentOS 8 on Lightsail for this tutorial I’m using AWS LightSail but you can install CentOS on any hosting provider.

After that, you’ll see available installation options. Select ‘Linux/Unix’ and ‘OS Only’ now you can see CentOS 8 available in the installation list.

After that, you’re going to choose your plan which totally depends on you, for now, I’m gonna choose a $10 monthly plan which is free right now for 3 months.

Now, name your instance and click on Create instance.

The installation process will take some time to complete. After that, you’ll see your instance is ready and running.

Congratulation, you have created your first instance let’s SSH into it and start our CentOS Web Panel process.

Install CentOS Web Panel on CentOS 8

Now, that you have installed CentOS 8 on your instance let’s update it first and start the installation process.

First, switch to root user with sudo su -

1. First, ensure your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf update

2. Update your Hostname

To update your hostname simply run this command.

hostnamectl set-hostname cp.hacktoday.com

3. Install CentOS Web Panel

cd /usr/local/src
wget http://centos-webpanel.com/cwp-el8-latest
sh cwp-el8-latest

The installation process will take some time to complete, once it’s done you’ll have access to the panel along with the credentials.

Now, reboot the system!

reboot

4. Access CentOS Web Panel

By default, CentOS Web Panel will be accessible via HTTPS port 2031. Navigate to https://your-domain.com:2031 or https://server-ip-address:2030 in your preferred browser. Log in to the panel with the root account of the system. In the previous step, you obtained the password. If you have a firewall, please open port 2030 in order to gain access to the control panel.