How to run Akeneo CE on Digital Ocean

Running Akeneo Community Edition (CE) on DigitalOcean involves deploying a Virtual Private Server (Droplet) and installing the necessary stack (PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, Elasticsearch, Apache/Nginx). While Docker is often recommended for modern Akeneo versions, a manual LAMP/LEMP stack installation on Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 is a reliable approach. 

1. Create a DigitalOcean Droplet

• This step are very easy and not scope of this post, just create a regular Ubuntu Droplet.

2. Prepare the Server (Pre-installation) 

apt update
apt upgrade -y
apt dist-upgrade
apt install apache2 -y
sudo systemctl enable apache2
sudo systemctl start apache2
sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https

sudo apt install php8.3 libapache2-mod-php8.3 php8.3-cli php8.3-mysql php8.3-curl php8.3-xml php8.3-mbstring php8.3-zip php8.3-gd php8.3-intl -y

sudo apt install aspell aspell-en

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo systemctl restart apache2

# Install Elastic Search

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/elasticsearch-keyring.gpg] https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/8.x/apt stable main" \
 | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-8.x.list


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install elasticsearch=8.17.0
sudo apt-mark hold elasticsearch
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start elasticsearch
sudo systemctl enable elasticsearch

# edit the config

vim /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml 

replaces the content with:

---
cluster.name: akeneo-cluster
node.name: akeneo-node

path.data: /var/lib/elasticsearch
path.logs: /var/log/elasticsearch

network.host: 127.0.0.1
http.port: 9200

discovery.type: single-node
xpack.security.enabled: false
---

sudo chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch /var/lib/elasticsearch
sudo chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch /var/log/elasticsearch

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart elasticsearch

Then test it with:

curl localhost:9200

# install composer

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('sha384', 'composer-setup.php') === 'c8b085408188070d5f52bcfe4ecfbee5f727afa458b2573b8eaaf77b3419b0bf2768dc67c86944da1544f06fa544fd47') { echo 'Installer verified'.PHP_EOL; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'.PHP_EOL; unlink('composer-setup.php'); exit(1); }"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

3. Install and Configure Akeneo

cd /var/www
git clone https://github.com/akeneo/pim-community-dev.git
mv pim-community-dev html
cd html

sudo -u www-data composer install
bin/console pim:installer:check-requirements

php bin/console pim:install –env=dev –force

curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_18.x | sudo -E bash –
sudo apt install -y nodejs

4. Configure Web Server (Apache HTTPS) 

sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-apache
sudo certbot –apache

5. Optional: DigitalOcean Managed Database (MySQL) 

6. Install Superviser

apt install supervisor

Add a config with the following:

[program:akeneo_queue_daemon]
command=/usr/bin/php /var/www/html/bin/console messenger:consume ui_job import_export_job data_maintenance_job –env=prod -vv
autostart=true
autorestart=true
stderr_logfile=/var/log/akeneo_daemon.err.log
stdout_logfile=/var/log/akeneo_daemon.out.log
user=my_user
stopasgroup=true

Key Considerations

• Elasticsearch: Akeneo will not run without a properly configured, active Elasticsearch instance.
• Cron Jobs: Set up the required cron jobs for indexation and data maintenance.
• Performance: For a better experience, consider Docker-based installation if you are familiar with containerisation.