Important information
Before you install cPanel & WHM or cPanel DNSONLY, you must know the following information:
- Because cPanel is designed for commercial hosting, we only license publicly visible, static IP addresses. We do not license dynamic, sticky, or internal IP addresses.
- We do not provide an uninstaller. After you install our software, you must reformat the server to remove it.
- Only install cPanel & WHM on a freshly installed operating system.
- We recommend that you use the cPanel & WHM installer, which will install all of the services that it needs. If you install services before you install cPanel & WHM, you will encounter compatibility problems. When you install your operating system, deselect software package groups like Gnome, KDE, or other GUI desktop environments.
- You will need a package handler like yum. This package handler is included in default installations of CentOS and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®.
Overview
Before you install cPanel & WHM or cPanel DNSONLY, make certain that your system meets all of our minimum requirements for new installations.
Perl must be present on your server before the installation script for cPanel & WHM can run successfully. If Perl is not present during installation, the cPanel & WHM installer will attempt to install Perl via the yum -y install perl
command. If this installation is not successful, you will see the following error message:
Fatal! Perl must be installed before proceeding! |
Perl versions
Your system Perl installation should be Perl 5.8.8 for RHEL 5 and CentOS™ 5 servers, or Perl 5.10 for RHEL 6 and CentOS 6 servers.
Manual installation
If you receive errors when the cPanel & WHM installer attempts to install Perl, make certain that yum functions correctly on your server.
To attempt to install Perl again, run the following command:
yum install perl
Supported operating systems
Operating system | Additional restrictions |
CentOS versions 5.x and 6.x |
New installations of cPanel & WHM on CentOS servers must use CentOS version 6.0 or higher. |
Red Hat Enterprise Linux® versions 5.x and 6.x | None. |
CloudLinux 5.x and 6.x |
cPanel does not support the use of Xen PV (paravirtualization) with CloudLinux. |
Supported virtual environments
Virtual environment | Additional restrictions |
KVM | None. |
Linux-VServer | None. |
Microsoft Server® 2008 Hyper-V |
cPanel only supports the drivers and configurations that Microsoft provides. |
OpenVZ |
|
Oracle VM VirtualBox, VirtualBox OSE | None. |
Virtuozzo™ |
CloudLinux is not compatible with Virtuozzo. |
VMware® Server, VMware ESX Server | None. |
Xen, XenEnterprise™, XenExpress™, XenServer™ | None. |
Virtual environments that are detected and reported as functional
Virtual environment | Additional restrictions |
SmartOS |
In order for cPanel & WHM to detect SmartOS, you must use cPanel & WHM version 11.36.1 or higher. |
Recommended file system
When you install your operating system, we recommend that you use an ext
filesystem (ext2
, ext3
, or ext4
).
If you use theext4
filesystem, you must download and install the package mentioned in the Red Hat documentation.
We only develop and test cPanel & WHM on file systems that support flock. Some network file systems (for example, NFS) may require additional configuration in order to function properly.
Recommended partitions
Partition Name
|
Size
|
---|---|
/ |
Grow to fill disk (40 GB recommended, 20 GB minimum) |
swap | See recommended swap space. |
For some servers, additional partitions are beneficial. This is particularly true for servers with high email volume. The number of files that the operating system can access per partition is limited.
iNodes
In Linux, an inode is a filesystem object that contains the owner, permissions, and other important metadata. Every file, image, directory, email, and symbolic link on your server requires an inode.
On average, files on webservers are usually smaller than on other types of servers. Therefore, we recommend that you allocate more than the default number of inodes on your server’s partitions.
If you install everything on a single partition, the base cPanel installation requires at least 1,000,000 inodes, plus at least 50,000 inodes per cPanel account that you plan to host.
If you plan to use the partition scheme on the Advanced Partitioning Guide, add the following to the default number of inodes per partition:
Partition
|
Number of inodes
|
---|---|
/home |
Add at least 50,000 inodes per cPanel account. |
/usr |
Add 100,000 inodes. |
/var |
Add 2,000 inodes, plus 100 inodes per account that you plan to host. |
/tmp |
Add 50% of the default value. |
/boot and swap |
Use default values. |
Recommended swap space
For CentOS 5 |
|
RAM | Minimum swap space |
---|---|
4 GB or less | 2 GB |
4 GB to 16 GB | 4 GB |
16 GB to 64 GB | 8 GB |
64 GB to 256 GB | 16 GB |
256 GB to 512 GB | 32 G |
For CentOS 6 |
|
RAM | Minimum swap space |
---|---|
2 GB or less | Two times the amount of RAM on the server. |
2 GB to 8 GB | The same as the amount of RAM on the server. |
8 GB to 64 GB | Half the amount of RAM on the server. |
64 GB or more | 4 GB |
Install cPanel & WHM
To install cPanel & WHM, run the following commands:
-
To open the
/home
directory, run the following command:cd
/home
-
To install GNU Wget, which you can use to retrieve installation files with HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP, run the following command:
yum
install
wget
-
To fetch the latest installation files from cPanel’s servers, run the following command:
wget -N http:
//httpupdate
.cpanel.net
/latest
-
To open and execute the installation files, run the following command:
sh latest