Joomla! Documentation™

The Raspberry Pi is a small single-board computer that was originally developed to promote the teaching of basic computer science in schools and developing countries. Because of its versatility it has become very popular and is used as media player, small stand-alone server, etc. You can use it as webserver and install Joomla on it. This page shows you how to get a your Joomla website running on the Raspberry Pi.

Hardware

• Rasberry Pi version 3 Model B - There are various models of Raspberry Pi. You can use most models that have an Ethernet port (the Model B types). However for performance we will use the latest version with most RAM memory.
• micro SD card - For the operating system + webserver + Joomla. (RPi version 3 model B uses micro SD other versions might use normal SD cards)
• 5 Volt adapter (1 Amp) - to power the Raspberry Pi you'll need to convert the mains power (230V or 110V) to 5 Volt. The Rasperry Pi needs about 1 Amp, and maybe more if you connect USB devices to it.
• standard Ethernet cable - to connect the RPi to your Local Area Network / router / the internet.

Operating System

The operating system Raspbian is a Debian Linux version specially compiled for the Raspberry Pi. There are two versions of Raspbian available: Raspbian Jessie with Pixel Lite (version with PIXEL desktop based on Debian Jessie) and Raspbian Jessie Lite (minimal version based on Debian Jessie). Because we use the Raspberry Pi as webserver for Joomla, we won't need the GUI.

Download Raspbian Jessie Lite

Unzip the downloaded file, e.g. 2016-09-23-raspbian-jessie-lite.zip (306 MB) to 2016-09-23-raspbian-jessie-lite.img (1.4 GB). Now we need to copy the .img file to the (micro) SD card.

Linux

We connect a SD Card reader with the (micro) SD Card to a computer. With dmesg we can find the device name of the SD Card. In our case it's sdd.

We will use dd ("Disk Dump") to write an Input File (if) to an Output File (of) using a specified Block Size (bs).

Be VERY careful: dd will write to a device without any warning. Triple double check that that you write to the right device! If you write to the wrong disk, then you'll always remember the dd command as "Disk Destroyer".

sudo dd if=~/Downloads/2016-09-23-raspbian-jessie-lite.img of=/dev/ssd bs=4M

Connecting Raspberry Pi to LAN

Now we put the micro SD card with the Operating System in the SD Card slot on the Raspberry Pi. With an Ethernet cable we connect the Raspberry Pi to the Local Area Network by connecting it to a router.

When the Raspberry Pi has been powered up after roughly 30 seconds, we need to find the IP address. We can use different approaches for that:

• log into the webinterface of your router and look up the connected devices;
• use a mobile phone connected the Wifi router using a network scanning App called Fing Overlook;
• use a command like nmap:

sudo nmap -sP 192.168.0/24

Webserver

A fast and leightweight alternative for Apache webserver is the becoming increasingly popular Nginx webserver.

Installation of Nginx

sudo apt-get install nginx

Starting Nginx webserver

sudo service nginx start